The Effect of a Flipped Classroom in a SPOC: Students' Perceptions and Attitudes

The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) has brought opportunities to higher education institutions. Despite this, one of the main drawbacks of MOOCs and SPOCs has been relatively low retention rate of the registered students. Having this in mind in this paper we report our research efforts with a SPOC on Applied Machine Learning specifically tailored for professional students. More concretely, we report our findings with regard to the effects of the flipped classroom approach on the students' perceptions and attitudes. The initial results show that flipping the class had direct effects on students' knowledge and skills compared to a fully online class setting. These findings have offered complementary explanations of the survey regression analysis which revealed that course structure/instructional approach followed by course content are the main drivers in accounting for the variance in students' overall perceptions of the course.

[1]  John A. Schibrowsky,et al.  Virtual Communities and the Assessment of Online Marketing Education , 2003 .

[2]  Panagiotis Adamopoulos,et al.  What makes a great MOOC? An interdisciplinary analysis of student retention in online courses , 2013, ICIS.

[3]  Ghada R. El Said,et al.  Exploring the factors affecting MOOC retention: A survey study , 2016, Comput. Educ..

[4]  Arianit Kurti,et al.  Bridging the Gap between Academia and Industry : Lessons Learned from a Graduate IT Professional Development Program , 2017 .

[5]  Cynthia Furse,et al.  Beyond the Click: Rethinking Assessment of an Adult Professional Development MOOC. , 2019 .

[6]  Serge Garlatti,et al.  Understanding Learner's Drop-Out in MOOCs , 2018, IDEAL.

[7]  Carlos Alario-Hoyos,et al.  A MOOC-Based Flipped Class: Lessons Learned from the Orchestration Perspective , 2017, EMOOCs.

[8]  Seda Yilmaz,et al.  Investigating the Impacts of Design Heuristics on Idea Initiation and Development , 2015 .

[9]  Armando Fox,et al.  From MOOCs to SPOCs , 2013, CACM.

[10]  Julio Villena-Román,et al.  From MOOCs to SPOCs... and from SPOCs to Flipped Classroom , 2017, EC-TEL.

[11]  Sarah Elizabeth Zappe,et al.  The evolution of a flipped classroom: Evidence-based recommendations , 2015 .

[12]  John A. Schibrowsky,et al.  The Interdependence of the Factors Influencing the Perceived Quality of the Online Learning Experience: A Causal Model , 2007 .

[13]  Martin Ebner,et al.  MOOCs Completion Rates and Possible Methods to Improve Retention - A Literature Review , 2014 .