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Evoli: A Digital Platform to Enhance Students’ Feedback in the Flipped Classroom

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Pennsylvania Convention Center, Terrace Ballroom Lobby, Table 9

Poster presentation
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Presenters

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Associate professor
Politecnico di Milano
Nicoletta Di Blas is associate professor at Politecnico di Milano, the largest technical university in Italy. Her field of expertise is educational technology. She is (co)director of two masters on the use of technologies in education and the digital transformation of the school system.
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PhD student
Politecnico di Milano
PhD student at Hypermedia Open Center at Politecnico di Milano. My research field is about educational technology and in particular the design and implementation of web platforms to support the teachers and enhancing the students' feedback.

Session description

The flipped classroom pedagogical paradigm has gained tremendous popularity. We propose enhancing the approach by “extending the classroom” with an innovative tool that allows students to express their level of understanding of the concepts before the contact hours, thus optimizing the process and enhancing individualization of learning.

Framework

Our theoretical background refers to the flipped classroom (FC) pedagogical model. According to the definition given by Herreid and Schiller (2013) in FC the work normally done in the classroom is done as a task and vice versa, hence the term "flipped." Students no longer listen to completely new content during the classroom session, but already prepare themselves at home with digital resources such as videos, documents, case studies, experiments or simulations and then proceed to discuss the content in class with their classmates and the teacher.
As mentioned earlier, the migration to online that the education system underwent during the pandemic allowed the flipped model to spread exponentially (Divjak et al., 2022). Some higher education institutions have also been able to survive with only flipped content delivery and through video conferencing applications, without investing funds to adopt complex pedagogical strategies (Crawford et al., 2020).
One of the most important findings of the review made by Divjak et al. (2020) is that the FC represents a framework that ensures a more personalized education to the individual student. Indeed, the student is at the core of this pedagogical model because the quality of the time spent in class is increased (Aşıksoy & Ozdamli, 2016; Nolan et al., 2021) guaranteeing a structured and active learning (Strelan at al., 2020): the student is encouraged to engage, inquiry and train her self-regulation skill (He et al, 2016). This active learning causes more students' engagement, which according to Bryson and Hand (2007) is a critical factor for effective teaching.

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Methods

Our case study analyzes the behavior of students involved in two flipped classrooms of the Plasma Physics course for master's degree students at Politecnico di Milano, the largest technical university in Italy. The teacher, before the course began, made available on Evoli two recordings of lectures from the 2021-2022 academic year and asked students to watch them on the EVOLI platform.
The first lecture, recorded on September 16, 2021, was divided into five chapters: Intro, Electrostatics, Magnetostatics, Electrodynamics and Lorentz force. The second lesson, recorded on Sept. 20, 2021, into 4 chapters: Microscopic Maxwell equations (arbitrary units), Unit systems in Electromagnetism, Electromagnetic potentials (+natural units), An exercise: Magnetic helicity.
43 students used EVOLI for watching the videos and commenting/expressing their understanding of them. 23 responded to an online questionnaire that was meant to probe the tool’s usability and perceived usefulness. The questionnaire was divided into 4 sections: personal data, System Usability Scale (SUS) test, Specific usability issues, General questions and comments.
The SUS test is a reliable, low cost usability scale that can be used for global assessment of system usability. SUS is composed of 10 statements to which the respondents indicate their degree of agreement, using a 5 point Likert scale. According to Sauro (2011) the average SUS score retrieved from 500 studies is 68. Thus we can consider reaching this threshold as a good result (meaning the usability of the system being tested is good).
The third section, "Specific usability issues," reported 7 statements about actions to be performed within the system and asked to specify how clear it was how to perform those actions or, if not performed, how clear it was to understand how they could be. The rating was on a scale from 1 (not clear) to 3 (clear).
The last section "General questions and comments" proposed 6 statements asking students to rate their agreement on a Likert scale from 1 (not agree at all) to 5 (completely agree). The statements were about the system’s actual usage: “I think that EVOLI is a useful tool”, “I find it useful to see how much my classmates have understood the lecture and what questions they ask”, “It is important to let the teacher know which parts are unclear”, “I think it would be useful to use EVOLI again, in this and in other courses”, “I would feel more confident to use EVOLI in an anonymous way” and “If I had been anonymous, I would have asked more questions”. Eventually, each respondent was asked to leave a free comment.
A short face to face interview with the instructor was taken, to investigate the advantages brought about by the tool, after the flipped session. The questions were two: “Did you find EVOLI useful?”, “What advantages did it bring, with respect to your normal way of dealing with these topics?”.

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Results

The 19 respondents to the survey were 15 male and 4 female, ranging from 22 to 26 years old.
The SUS test gave excellent results, with a score of 83, far exceeding the threshold of sufficiency, 68, suggested by Sauro (2011). Although the SUS represents a quick-and-dirty analysis, we can say that Evoli turns out to be a usable platform from the very first use.
The third section investigated the usability of some crucial features, with scores from 1 (lowest) to 3 (highest). The average score of all was 2.8, confirming the results of the SUS test. Only two actions have been scored 1 (i.e. “difficult to perform”); iIt is important to note that the actions to enter the feedback on how clear a topic is, the focal feature of the platform, are particularly easy to perform.
The results of the 6 statements mentioned in the last section confirm the validity of the approach: the students have reported with an average score of 4.0/5 that the tool is useful and with an average score of 4.0/5 that reporting to the teachers what is clear/unclear is a good idea and with an average of 4.1/5 that they would like to use the tool again. 73.9% of the respondents rated the usefulness of the platform and its main features with a score of 4 or higher out of 5. Letting the teacher know which parts are unclear is considered the most useful feature.
Students seem also eager to compare their level of understanding with that of their peers, scoring the statement on “how useful you find to see your classmates level of understanding 3.99. This opens up to scenarios of collaborative learning through the tool on which we are working.
The surprise came with the data on anonymity: students seem to think that being anonymous would not make much difference in their confidence or in the number of questions they would ask (average score: 2.5).
After analyzing the data, we can conclude that the platform, whose aim is to support and augment the students’ feedback in a flipped classroom setting, was considered useful by its main stakeholders.

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Importance

From an educational point of view, the platform has proved successful: higher education students seem to find it useful, would like to have it in other courses and are not hindered by interacting with their real identity. In the free comments section, some asked for the possibility to enhance the playback speed of the video, an important hint on how they normally use this kind of resources. The instructor acknowledges some important advantages, like the optimization of the lessons, i.e. taking less time to cover the same topics and the individualization of learning, i.e. the fact that all students were able to reach the desired level of knowledge and expertise, each at her own pace, supported by the platform.

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References

Aksarina, I. Y., Dossayeva, S. K., Kosov, A. V., Stepanova, G. A., & Kassymova, G. K. (2019). Foresight innovations in educational systems in the BRICS countries. Bulletin of National academy of sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 4(380), 123-131.
Asiksoy, G., & Özdamli, F. (2016). Flipped classroom adapted to the ARCS model of motivation and applied to a physics course. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education. https://doi.org/10.12973/eurasia.2016. 1251a
Babbar, M., & Gupta, T. (2022). Response of educational institutions to COVID-19 pandemic: An inter-country comparison. Policy Futures in Education, 20(4), 469-491.
Beatty, B. J. (2006). Designing the HyFlex World- Hybrid, Flexible Classes for All Students. Paper presented at the 2006 Association for Educational Communication and Technology International Conference, Dallas, TX.
Bryson, C., & Hand, L. (2007). The role of engagement in inspiring teaching and learning. Innovations in Education and Teaching International. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703290701602748
Crawford, J. A., Butler-Henderson, K. A., Jurgen, R., & Malkawi, B. H. (2020). COVID-19: 20 countries’ higher education intraperiod digital pedagogy responses. Journal of Applied Learning Teaching. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2020.3.1.7
Di Blas, N. (2022). Distributed Cognition and exam preparation in higher education: what sources students use before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. REM, 14(1), 112-119.
Divjak, B., Rienties, B., Iniesto, F., Vondra, P., & Žižak, M. (2022). Flipped classrooms in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: findings and future research recommendations. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 19(1), 1-24.
Flipped Learning Network (FLN). (2014) The Four Pillars of F-L-I-P™ Reproducible PDF can be found at www.flippedlearning.org/definition.
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2016). Deep residual learning for image recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90
Herreid, C. F., & Schiller, N. A. (2013). Case studies and the flipped classroom. Journal of college science teaching, 42(5), 62-66.
Kassymova, G. (2018). Competence and its implications. Challenges of Science. https://doi.org/10.31643 /2018.063
Nkomo, L. M., Daniel, B. K., & Butson, R. J. (2021). Synthesis of student engagement with digital technologies: a systematic review of the literature. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 18(1), 1-26.
Nolan, E., Brady, M., Rienties, B., & Héliot, Y. (2021). Once more on the rollercoaster: loses and gains from the rapid shift to online delivery during Covid. Academy of Management Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2021.15358abstr act
Pratama, H., Azman, M. N. A., Kassymova, G. K., & Duisenbayeva, S. S. (2020). The Trend in using online meeting applications for learning during the period of pandemic COVID-19: A literature review. Journal of Innovation in Educational and Cultural Research, 1(2), 58-68.
Sauro, J., PhD. (n.d.). Measuring Usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS) – MeasuringU. Retrieved September 19, 2022, from https://measuringu.com/sus/
Strelan, P., Osborn, A., & Palmer, E. (2020). The flipped classroom: a meta-analysis of effects on student performance across disciplines and education levels. Educational Research Review. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100314
Triyono, B. M., Mohib, N., Kassymova, G. K., Pratama, G. N. I. P., Adinda, D., & Arpentieva, M. R. (2020). The Profile Improvement of Vocational School Teachers’ Competencies. Vysshee obrazovanie v Rossii= Higher Education in Russia, 29(2), 151-158.

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Session specifications

Topic:
Distance, online & blended learning
Grade level:
Community college/university
Audience:
Chief technology officers/superintendents/school board members, Coaches, Teachers
Attendee devices:
Devices useful
Attendee device specification:
Smartphone: Android, iOS, Windows
Laptop: Chromebook, Mac, PC
Tablet: Android, iOS, Windows
ISTE Standards:
For Educators:
Facilitator
  • Foster a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes in both independent and group settings.
For Students:
Empowered Learner
  • Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.