Flipping education seamlessly

The advancement in technology and the emergence of digital natives has sparked a transformation, where teaching and learning is moving away from the one-size-fits-all model. The traditional brick-and-mortar model of delivery is facing disruption from technologies that are promoting time and location-independent access to knowledge.

The role of a teacher is slowly evolving from teaching to facilitating. This leads to learners being given the opportunity to apply concepts and theories in classrooms rather than merely learning them. Learners are now able to explore various concepts and knowledge outside of the classroom via their mobile devices for instance and use these findings to enrich the classroom lessons. Digital environments such as social platforms, crowd sourcing platforms, YouTube videos, Google, podcast, blogs and educational games offer opportunities for self-directed and exploratory learning to be promoted.

Activity learning rather than instructional is key to the Flipped Classroom movement. Flipped classroom is “turning education on its head” by basically delivering instructions (concepts, theories, etc.) online and outside of the classroom context and moving “homework” into the classroom[1]. Learners will apply what they have learned in the classroom to enhance their understanding with teachers acting as facilitators. This offers opportunities for various technology-enhanced learning approaches (including game-based learning and digital-based gamification) to be experimented within this flipped context.

This self-directed approach however poses challenges with respect to effective monitoring of activities and how different media are being used and their influence in promoting learning. How can we encourage and ensure seamless learning experience? Seamless learning[2] could become a highly efficient approach in storing and retrieving information. Convergences of technologies and the learning analytics approach may help connect learning across different settings, technologies and activities to support seamless learning experience within the flipped classroom context.

The evolution of pedagogy is influenced by the way teaching and learning is being disrupted by the emerging technologies and digital culture. We should embrace it and run with it.

At the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL), we are keen to develop a robust framework to support such evolution of teaching and learning practices. Could gamification be a wrapper to encapsulate, manage and optimise our experience in consuming, curating and creating digital learning resources?