Self-Flipped Classroom Reuse of Student-Produced Videos for Flipped Classrooms

Abstract

The cultures of social media and prosumerism enter the domain of modern education and power a shift towards learner-centred active learning with a focus on learning through making in nearly every subject, discipline and level of teaching. Keeping pace with these changes requires pedagogical innovation and motivates us to develop and evaluate a new instructional and learning approach that is built on the reuse of student-produced content. This research has defined such a pedagogical approach, the Self-Flipped Classroom, built on the synergy of Flipped Classroom and learning through making pedagogies. In the proposed approach, the self- part of the name refers to materials that students produce as part of their own learning; and the -flip part of the name refers to reuse of these materials by instructors for teaching other students in the flipped classroom pedagogical model. This thesis presents the Self-Flipped Classroom both from theoretical and practical viewpoints, and discusses the experience of implementing the approach in courses related to Human-Computer Interaction discipline in two universities (Newcastle University, UK and Uppsala University, Sweden). The main contribution of this work is twofold. First, theoretical – in terms of the positioning of the new pedagogy within existing theories and pedagogical approaches. Second, practical – in presenting the testing and evaluation of two variants of the approach (the Distributed and the Enclosed Self-Flipped Classrooms) in real case studies. Anyone who is interested in trying the approach in their own practice will find the results of the presented case studies to be informative from two perspectives: a) student attitudes to and experiences of the Self-Flipped Classroom; b) associated benefits and challenges of the Self-Flipped Classroom for instructors. As part of the investigation of student experiences of the presented approach, this thesis explores lifelong learning skills development (media literacy, collaboration, attribution and others) that are found amid other benefits for students who engage with the Self-Flipped Classroom. The presented research has been conducted in the context of Computer Science education, however, the presented results, and particularly the proposed Self-Flipped Classroom approach, can be applicable to other disciplines.