Ritu Chaturvedi, University of Guelph, Canada

In an effort to improve student engagement in large programming classes, this study proposes a pseudo-flipped (PF) method of teaching that combines the core principles of two popular teaching methods, traditional and flipped (or inverted), thereby mitigating the drawbacks of these methods. In traditional teaching, class time is mostly used by instructors to teach a class using pre-prepared lecture slides and smartboards or similar alternatives, whereas students, mostly passively, listen to the lecture and take notes. In a purely flipped class, all resources traditionally taught in classroom are moved outside the classroom, either as text, video, audio, students are expected to read or view lectures before class, and the instructor uses class time in solving problems. In the proposed PF method, students are taught in a traditional way for half the allocated time. For the other half, students solve problems in class with the instructor’s assistance. Similar to the flipped method, in PF, students learn concepts on their own outside the classroom using an interactive textbook. To fill gaps in their knowledge, instructors spend time teaching those core concepts in class by solving problems. PF promotes active learning by engaging students towards solving problems on learnt concepts. A survey is done in a programming class to find student opinion on how useful this pseudo-flipped method is on student engagement as opposed to traditional teaching. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey responses strongly favour the proposed method, with more than 70% of students in favour of it.