Flipping a Programming Course with Low Lecture Attendance

Abstract

Low lecture attendance has been a serious concern for many university courses. This paper describes how low lecture attendance was solved in our Web Programming course by adopting the flipped class teaching method. In making the change to a flipped course, we replaced all live lectures (except for week 1 lecture) with pre-recorded lectures, that were made available on the course website each week. But we retained the face-to-face, and must attend laboratory classes, which were essential for student-teacher interaction and active learning. Two studies over three course offerings were carried out to compare the traditional teaching method with flipped class. In both studies, students in the flipped course offerings had better learning outcomes than students in the traditional course offerings. In addition, the flipped course offerings scored better in the end of semester student experience survey, both in terms of the perceived quality of the teaching and student engagement.