Drivers of Openness to Online and Flipped Learning in Medical Education

One online teaching approach that has gained popularity in health science education is the ‘flipped classroom’ where students undertake content learning prior to face-to-face class time, often via watching pre-recorded videos. This frees up contact time for activities which stimulate higher-order thinking. While previous studies have generally reported neutral to positive student feedback and effects on academic attainment, the quality of pre-class resources and time required for pre-class work have been identified as potential problems with the approach. A further issue identified in the literature is students’ openness to adopting new forms of learning. This paper examines students’ responses to the flipped classroom in two undergraduate medical education courses, in which students were assigned pre-work comprising a mix of short video lectures and brief online activities. Following the unanticipated finding that students in the fourth and fifth year courses formed very different views of a similar flipped learning intervention, this study explored: • How do students use online pre-class resources in a flipped classroom? • What factors influence students’ openness to using online resources in a flipped classroom? This study used a course evaluation survey followed by focus group interviews to understand students’ use of and attitudes towards the flipped classroom. Many students in groups reversed or wanted to reverse the intended ‘flipped’ order of classes to use the online material as revision aids rather than as pre-class work. Students in both groups identified that time pressure influenced the way they used the pre-class material. The fifth year cohort held a largely positive attitude towards the flipped classroom whereas the fourth year group held a largely negative view. Differences students’ willingness to tolerate uncertainty, connections with clinical learning and metacognitive view of ‘learning’ itself appear to account Kenwright D, Osborne E, Dai W, Grainger R MedEdPublish https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2016.000080 Page | 2 for this difference in outcome.