Information Systems Education Journal (ISEDJ) 11 (1)
ISSN: 1545-679X February 2013
©
2013 EDSIG (Education Special Interest Group of the AITP) Page 65
www.aitp-edsig.org /www.isedj.org
The content, structure, and exams for all three
sections were virtually identical. The honors and
accelerated sections had more involved
assignments than the evening students, and
these students often brought in external
readings for class discussion. The graded Excel
assignments were the same, both in class and
out of class, for all three sections. The depth of
discussion, number and variety of questions,
motivation of students, and degree of help and
explanations that the instructor provided varied
greatly between the sections.
All students must complete exercises from a
textbook companion web site to demonstrate
their mastery of the course topics. Students
submit their completed assignments online and,
soon afterward, receive an automated report
summarizing their scores and indicating which
steps are correct. Students have up to five
attempts to complete these exercises; their
highest score counts toward their final grade.
Prior to the flipped classroom approach, the
instructor would explain Excel concepts in class
or demonstrate a tutorial from the textbook
during class as students tried to follow along on
their laptops. They would then go home to
complete the mastery exercises.
In the flipped approach, when students watch
the instructional videos before class, there is no
in-class demonstration or lecture by the
instructor. Students immediately get to work
completing an in-class group activity. Also, the
instructor is readily available to help students
complete these exercises; whereas at home,
students are on their own or need to visit the
tutoring lab or the instructor at a later time if
they require assistance in order to complete the
assignments.
These guidelines influenced the implementation
of the flipped IT 101 classroom, whose 75-
minute sessions usually followed this structure:
• five minutes: welcome and
announcements
• five minutes: quick quiz based on videos
• five minutes: explain in-class activity
• 40 to 45 minutes: complete the in–class
activity in groups
• 15 to 20 minutes: debrief, where each
group shares what they did, how they
solved a problem, problems they
encountered
This structure creates an active learning
experience where “learners participat[e] in
open-ended, learner-centered activities that
involve practical, meaningful application of the
concepts of interest; collaborative problem
solving and opportunities for public/personal
articulation and reflection are also important”
(Day, 2008, p. 27).
Creating Screencasts
For this study, the instructor reached out to
student tutors in the CIS department’s learning
lab to create two or three instructional
screencasts per chapter for IT 101 students to
watch. Tutors worked with the instructor to
identify and discuss content for the videos.
Their work as tutors during previous semesters
or their own experience learning Excel
themselves in IT 101 made them uniquely
qualified to create the instructional videos. They
were familiar with, and therefore able to address
many frequently asked questions on Excel
topics. There were no limitations as to style or
format of the videos; students could be as
creative as they wished. The only requirements
were that each video included a common title
graphic identifying its topic and a request to
keep the length to between seven and ten
minutes, as previous research in student-created
podcasts has shown this duration to be within
the attention span of first-year college students.
(Frydenberg, 2008)
Students used a variety of free web tools to
create their videos
ii
, posted their videos to a
common YouTube channel and embedded them
on a web site available to all IT 101 students.
iii
Videos were usually posted the week prior to
when students would complete activities based
on them during class.
Quick Quizzes for Evaluation
Most classes began with a quick five-question,
five-minute, multiple-choice quiz based on the
week’s videos. The instructor used Blackboard, a
learning management system, to administer the
quizzes online so that they could easily be
timed, and automatically graded.
Quizzes motivated students to watch the videos
because each counted a small amount toward
final grades. The quizzes also helped learners
check their understanding of key concepts prior
to doing the hands-on, in-class activity, and as
such bridged the gap between the outside-the-
classroom learning and inside-the-classroom
application of that learning.