Breaking Walls with Flipped Classroom

CONTEXT

The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest threat to education and training in the modern history of Europe that has ever been witnessed. Millions of students, teachers, and school staff have been affected worldwide, and many of them have had to switch to digital education to continue the academic year.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has carried out a research on the impact of Covid-19 on school closures and affected learners around the world. The results show that in Italy 4,6 million, in Turkey 11,4 million, in Portugal 770 thousand, in Spain 3,3 million and in Iceland 21,1 thousand of secondary school students were affected because of the lockdown. The UNESCO also reports that “by mid-April 2020, a total of 1.725 billion students globally had been affected by the closure of schools and higher education institutions in response to the COVID.” As a matter of fact, the COVID lockdown has been a turning point for digital education everywhere.

In light of these exceptional circumstances, our goal is to increase the quality of education among our schools and support teachers in mastering digital competences together with blended learning and e-learning environments to cope with the recent challenges.

In this context, in order to achieve the objectives mentioned above, Flipped Learning along with a blended learning method have been considered to provide the learner with more suitable learning strategies to face this change of education set up.

A Flipped Learning Model helps the learner by selecting how, when and where to learn. It integrates in- class face-to-face learning activities with online out-of-school learning in the most appropriate way. Furthermore, it allows students to perform lower-level cognitive tasks such as knowledge acquisition and understanding before the lesson, and focus on higher-level cognitive tasks such as implementation, analysis, synthesis, assessment with peers and teacher support during the course. It ensures an excellent adaptation to the Bloom Taxonomy too.

With our project, we aim to equip our schools and training systems with tools to face the challenges presented by the recent sudden shift to online and distance learning, including supporting teachers to develop digital competences and conserving the inclusive nature of learning opportunities.