Are my students ready: A case of flipped learning in an IT subject

Flipped classroom has been a popular teaching approach in recent years. Students are asked to learn an assigned set of materials before class and solve problems in groups during class time with the help of teachers. In this paper, we have studied the student readiness and their learning achievements after adopting flipped classroom teaching in a database class in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The database class has about 100 undergraduate students studying in the Department of Computing. There are 8 topics of the database subject and two core topics have been selected for flipped classroom arrangement. For the selected topics, pre-class learning contents including videos clips, presentation slides, exercises and animated games have been developed. Students could then access these materials, have a pre-quiz via the OpenEdX platform before the special classes, and solve the problems they met in pre-quiz through a group exercise. Access logs of the class materials, feedback surveys and results of class exercises have been collated together for analyzing student readiness and their learning behaviour. Overall, it is encouraging to observe that students have been accessing the pre-class materials quite frequently. Some students only accessed the learning materials only a day before the flipped class. Yet, it may not be necessarily to consider this is a bad sign as it is reflecting the empowerment of their learning schedules. Without the flipped classroom arrangement, students would have less motivation to prepare for the class and possibly only listening to the teacher passively during the class time.