The flipped classroom through the lens of “digital experience” is what I have been fortunate to study, practice, and implement for the past two and a half years. More specifically, the flipped classroom is the vehicle I use to empower learners of the software Drupal 8 (https://www.drupal.org/8). The two primary goals of the Drupal 8 Immersion flipped classroom course are: 1) become competent in the areas of Drupal the student wishes 2) become professionally certified in Drupal 8 development.

The concept of Ubiquitous learning involves allowing learning to happen anywhere, at anytime. A flipped learning model is an excellent approach to provide a system and a methodology to achieve a learning experience that has both the “learn at anytime” and “learn anywhere” concepts in the real world.

By non-complex definition a “flipped classroom” is where the ‘homework’ and ‘class’ part of traditional classroom-based learning are reversed. The learners learn at home and the they do the homework in class, so to speak. With flipped learning instead of the teacher spending most of their time explaining concepts, comparatively, the teacher is spending most of class time helping students understand concepts by doing exercises and activities in class.

The flipped class I implement is also a bit of “blended” learning. Every week the students and I meet in real time through a video conferencing software Zoom (https://zoom.us). Using this and other special video-conferencing tools, the students are placed into small groups so that peer-to-peer learning can happen and the instructor and be in specific rooms as they wish too. By sharing existing learning resources found around around the internet within the class Learning Management System, this creates a space where students can learn any time. This allows the instructor to act as a moderator in the sharing of learning resources.

Another point I have found effective when teaching the flipped class is to do exercises in the blended real time virtual meetings, instead of “lecturing”. By applying Bloom’s Taxonomy to the learning process, we practice in real-time the concepts they learned through the Learning Management System in class by breaking into groups and doing targeted exercises.

Here is a class photo taken recently, notice how the students get to interact together. Notice how most students look like they are having fun!

flipped class fun

The melding of the face-to-face and online environments in blended learning offers a unique set of opportunities and challenges in the course design process. I recommend designing the course by going through the following phases: 1) course description 2) course goals 3) learning objectives 4) learning outcomes. For further resources on how to create a blended course I highly recommend this link:

https://blended.online.ucf.edu/process/building-your-course