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The University of Lisbon (Universidade de Lisboa) brings together various areas of knowledge and has a privileged position in facilitating the contemporary evolution of science, technology, arts, and humanities. The quality of teaching, research, innovation, and culture is attracting an ever-increasing amount of talent from around the world.
Sofia Sá is an educational psychologist and certified pedagogical trainer registered with the scientific and pedagogical Portuguese counsel for continual training, and is also an invited lecturer at the University of Lisbon. Her primary research interest is active learning methods and their implementation in Higher Education. For 20 years, she has been engaged in multiple training initiatives and acted as a pedagogical consultant and trainer for both the private and public Sectors.
The University of Lisbon (Universidade de Lisboa) brings together various areas of knowledge and has a privileged position in facilitating the contemporary evolution of science, technology, arts, and humanities. The quality of teaching, research, innovation, and culture is attracting an ever-increasing amount of talent from around the world.
Sofia Sá is an educational psychologist and certified pedagogical trainer registered with the scientific and pedagogical Portuguese counsel for continual training, and is also an invited lecturer at the University of Lisbon. Her primary research interest is active learning methods and their implementation in Higher Education. For 20 years, she has been engaged in multiple training initiatives and acted as a pedagogical consultant and trainer for both the private and public Sectors.
To create engaging, meaningful learning experiences for over 400 students with diverse needs and preferences, Sofia Sá decided to implement flipped classroom and active learning with support from FeedbackFruits tools.
For 4 years, Sofia has been in charge of two curricular units on Communication Skills in Engineering to 450 Master’s students, which is undoubtedly a challenge considering the large student cohort with diverse learning needs and preferences. That’s why Sofia decided to adopt the flipped learning after 3 years of running the course.
Flipped learning is a well-known pedagogical approach in which students study the course content beforehand, then engage in discussions, application projects, or problem-solving activities to apply the learned knowledge during class. This method has been proven to promote a student-centered learning environment, with active engagement, continuous feedback, and collaboration opportunities.
“Flipped learning, sometimes called the flipped classroom, is a pedagogical approach which uses time and space in a different way from the way courses are typically taught… FL reverses this by moving first contact with new concepts to the individual space and using the newly-expanded time in class for students to pursue difficult, higher-level tasks together, with the instructors as a guide.” - Robert Talbert in Myths and Facts about flipped learning.
This is what flipped learning is normally perceived by optimistic instructors. Many other educators or “pessimists” according to Sofia raise concern over student disengagement during the asynchronous content study phase, leading to a lack of preparation during class time.
“What some educators think will happen is 10% of students study the materials and actually prepare, while the other 90% won’t do anything. Then the teachers have to explain the concepts on the materials all over again in class, creating a Flop Learning instead of a Flipped Learning.”
For Sofia, flipped learning can be a lot more. It is about generating plenty of opportunities for engagement with content before class so that students come to lessons well-prepared while maximizing time for active learning activities during classes. This is why she decided to make use of interactive materials and active learning design to flip the classroom successfully. Furthermore, Sofia opted for FeedbackFruits solutions to help her design and facilitate these two approaches in less time and more effectively.
Before using the flipped learning, Sofia implemented interactive lectures for her communication skills course. Each lesson was divided into small bits, with 10-12 minute lectures followed by 3-4 minute activities.
“I did a little lecturing, then an activity, then a little lecturing again, followed by another activity.”
For example, in the lesson about “Active listening verbal techniques”, Sofie would start by explaining the definition, then ask students to research the benefits of active listening in engineering. This is followed by instructor presentation moment on a research article and a practice quiz for students. Finally, students watch videos on verbal techniques of active listening and work in groups on a case study in either breakout rooms or face-to-face.
Such interactive lecture design absolutely promotes active learning among the students; however, only during class time. By adopting flipped learning, Sofia wanted to stimulate engagement beyond the classroom and encourage students to take charge of their own learning.
After flipping, her design consisted of two main parts: asynchronous content study and in-class application activities. In preparation for the synchronous sessions, students watched an explanation video on the content, read an informal text related to the topic (a blog, for example) and a research article on the subject.
After this stage, the in-class session was dedicated to several activities namely:
We can see next an example of the active listening verbal techniques week.
It is undoubtedly easy to initiate active learning during in-class sessions, but what about the preparation stage? How can the instructor motivate students to actively engage with the study materials? Sofia’s solution was to create interactive moments within the study content using pedagogical tools, which were FeedbackFruits Interactive Video and Interactive Document. She noted:
“With FeedbackFruits we could implement active engagement in the preparation phase, along with the active learning we already did in classes. This was a wonderful turning point for us - finally, we could implement flipped learning and make sure the reading and viewing of the materials were active and engaging."
With FeedbackFruits tools being integrated into Moodle, Sofia could create plenty of active moments within the preparation videos and written study materials. That is, Interactive Video and Interactive Document allowed her to enrich the content with explanations, questions, and discussions for students to respond to and engage with.
Sofia also turned the preparation activity into an assessment component to make sure all students participate and deliver quality performance. Explaining this decision, Sofia said:
“Assessment is central to the student’s experience. Grades matter. We may want it or not, we may like it or not, we might even hate it, but grades do matter. And it's not about getting better grades or asking better questions, but it's about creating a paradigm shift in students’ mindset.”
To measure the effectiveness of including assessment elements in the interactive activity, Sofia and 2 other instructors conducted a case study comparing three different activity designs as follows:
All instructors used FeedbackFruits Interactive Video to issue the activity within the same student cohort. Furthermore, they shared the belief that commenting or interacting with the materials promotes learning, which they emphasized in the activity.
The result of the case study was that 93% of the comments produced by students were for the third activity design by Sofia. To explain such higher engagement, Sofia asked students and received a response:
“We have a lot to do but we don't have a lot of time. So if we are gaining something for doing it, then it will be on our top priority tasks.”
By grading students in the preparation activity, instructors can encourage students to be mindful of their own learning, thus gradually forming the habit of active engagement. Based on the positive outcomes of the case study, Sofia integrated the assessment scheme throughout her flipped course. Below you can find a brief overview of the assessment design.
The entire course amounted to 2000 points in the end, with 1400 points awarded to 7 themed lessons and 600 points for the individual (group) project. Each theme lesson was assigned 200 points: the preparation phase and application task each accounted for half of these points.
Using FeedbackFruits, Sofia could easily create an interactive activity with graded elements. Automatic, adjustable grading allowed for specifying the points received for completing each activity step, such as viewing the video (documents), answering the questions, and starting and responding to discussion threads. With this grade weighting per step transparent for students, increased motivation and higher participation were seen as a result.
The 100 points of the preparation phase were divided through the different materials, and each material had specific actions to perform to gain the respective points, as we can see in the following example regarding the introduction module of “Communication in engineering".
Furthermore, students were able to choose what study materials to engage with based on their preferences, because nothing is mandatory. Sofia believed this would encourage autonomy and self-regulation as students can decide on their own learning trajectory.
“What I want them to learn is communication skills. It’s their choice to choose to watch the video or read the article. Their end results would then depend on what they choose to study and engage with. And I know that the students who decide to read the scientific articles will learn more, so they will have a better grade.”
The implementation of this new curricular design generated great results, according to Sofia. Students’ engagement during the preparation stage was significant. For example, 434 out of 454 students actively watched and interacted with the first video regarding the importance of communication for software engineers which was amazing.
“For the two curricular units, I had a lot of engagement during the preparation phase with FeedbackFruits. Students interacted a lot, mostly on videos.”
Engagement and active learning were also observed for the application tasks. Students brought up lots of questions during the group discussion segment, where teams presented their learnings of the pre-class activities. Sofia also noticed interesting questions that had never been asked before in the previous courses.
“In the second class of the flipped learning design I had one student raise a question – “Is silence verbal, non-verbal, or not communication at all?” I remembered at that point, I had known more than 400 students every year for 3 years, and none ever asked me that question. Now I just implemented flipped learning for 2 weeks and this amazing question is here. I was sure it was worth it at that point."
Combining active and interactive preparation with in-class active learning has done wonders for her courses, by stimulating continuous engagement and autonomy in both asynchronous and synchronous learning segments. As Sofia remarked:
“Flipped learning helps us all to have more active learning moments in class. We all should be thinking of implementing it. And FeedbackFruits helps us do this, by promoting active learning also in the preparation phase. It's amazing.”
Sofia shared some of her go-to resources for understanding and implementing these two pedagogical approaches:
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