Using a SPOC to flip the classroom

Abstract

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. G. Martínez-Muñoz and E. Pulido, "Using a SPOC to flip the classroom," 2015 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), Tallinn, 2015, pp. 431-436. doi: 10.1109/EDUCON.2015.7096007The benefits of using SPOC platforms into face-to-face education are yet to be completely analysed. In this work we propose to use SPOCs and video contents to flip the classroom. The objective is to improve the involvement and satisfaction of students with the course, to reduce the drop-out rates and to improve the face-to-face course success rate. We apply these ideas to an undergraduate first year course on Data Structures and Algorithms. The study is validated by collecting data from two consecutive editions of the course, one in which the flipped classroom model and videos were used and other in which they were not. The gathered data included online data about the students' interaction with the SPOC materials and offline data collected during lectures and exams. In the edition where the SPOC materials were available, we have observed a correlation between the students' final marks and their percentage rate of video accesses with respect to the total number of accesses, which indicates a better academic performance for students who prefer videos over documents.Authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Dirección General de Investigación project TIN2013-42351-P and from Comunidad de Madrid project CASI-CAM S2013/ICE-2845