The flipped classroom experience

This paper describes the findings on `flipping the classroom' pedagogy for one selected topic in the Software Engineering module. A flipped classroom is a form of blended learning where the lecture is moved outside the classroom with the help of technology and learning activities are moved inside the classroom. The students typically watch instructional videos outside of the classroom but participate in learning activities with other students in class. This allows students to learn on their own time and pace outside class time while enabling the lecturer to enhance interaction, collaboration and higher-order thinking of students by monitoring individual learning and task performance. Our past experience has shown that using the traditional approach to teach software engineering, which is a heavily conceptual and theoretical subject, can be challenging. Against this backdrop, we have devised a flipped class room trial to let the students carry out the learning activities before coming to class where they then share and apply the knowledge during face-to-face lessons for more engaging learning experience. As this is an initial trial, the author has chosen a topic that is relatively easy to understand and with support of interesting videos readily available online. The purpose is to motivate the use of flipped classroom for appropriate topics taught in Software Engineering curriculum.