The Future of Education

The emergence of ICT tools in education gives new opportunities for using Flipped Classroom (FC) methods in education. Although the use of FC methods presents numerous benefits, its widespread use is hindered by factors like increased efforts necessary for preparing FC activities or lack of recognition and/or support in using this method. FC methods are prone to be used for developing transversal competences like self-regulated learning (Fu, 2013), communication skills (Lo & Hew, 2017) and critical thinking skills (Santos & Serpa, 2020). Critical thinking is listed among the information competency standards and is often cited as one of the most meaningful learning outcomes in many information literacy plans and activities. In the “Critical thinking in the information society (CTIS)” project educational materials were elaborated for teaching an introductory course in Critical Thinking and Media Literacy. Videos and tests for teaching 20 subjects in these topics were developed in collaboration of five universities from Romania, Greece, Poland, Lithuania and Bulgaria. The developed materials were tested in classroom settings. In this paper we present the results of student satisfaction and teacher experiences when applying the developed materials at Sapientia University (Romania). As compared to the control group, preliminary results indicate higher level of student engagement and increased student satisfaction when learning with flipped methods.