INVESTIGATING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' VIEWS ON FLIPPED CLASSROOM APPROACH

Recent advances in technology have initiated a new era in education and thus provided new learning opportunities as support or as an alternative to traditional teaching and learning practices. Among these recently emerged technologically enriched educational strategies, flipped classroom approach has been widely and globally used by many higher education institutions due to its flexibility and affordability. Yet, not much known particularly about students' actual engagement, motivation, interaction and learning aspects during flipped classroom facilities. The aim of the study is to investigate students' views on recently implemented flipped undergraduate ethics for information technology course. For this purpose, traditional ongoing ethics for information technology course was transformed into debate oriented, partially flipped classroom course. The materials used in flipped classroom which were adapted to cover both low and high order thinking skills are; weekly reading tutorials, weekly 15-20 minutes duration tutorial videos, weekly online, 45 minute objective tests, weekly group debate discussion activities, weekly in-class individual debate activities, 3 essay writing assignments on a popular assigned topics, watching an animation video and solving ethical IT related dilemmas and constructing ethical IT related scenarios regarding privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility. The materials were hosted through Moodie and were graded online. The data was collected from 6 university students who enrolled to the course in 2018 spring academic semester. 14 week duration course was taught and led by the researcher. Students' views were collected based on identifying their engagement, motivation, interaction and learning using pre-post surveys, during and after course session completion structured interviews and examining course activities such as quizzes, scenarios, debates, assignments, project, individual and group in and outside class activities. The results revealed that all students were highly motivated to use and experience flipped classroom approach. While majority of the students actively engaged with flipped classroom activities, only slightly more than half of the students actually interacted with presented activities. On the other hand, learning category revealed mediocre results. The findings suggested that flipped classroom approach could be motivating for students who are already keen on learning and self-directed. It was noticed that flipped classroom approach that are effective in enhancing learning for high achieving and self-directed learners might had hindering effect on more demanding learners that seek for frequent guidance. Findings can contribute to educators as well as to researchers investigating important and contributing aspects of flipped classroom approach.