The Future of Education

Teaching, not only, consists of the communication of knowledge to students. It also entails the searching for the correct way of getting that knowledge to student in the most effective, relevant and technically accessible way at each time. When organising courses it is natural to ask what teaching methods are the most suitable. Answers have recently been sought to this question in the course Spoken and Written Language, which about one hundred on-site and distance students attend in the Teacher Education Department of the School of Education at the University of Iceland in the fall of 2014. Various methods have been tried and in the autumn 2014 semester the method of flipped learning was used for the second time.

Flipped learning consists of turning the method of teaching upside down. The Spoken and Written Language course was taught using the flipped learning methodology, where short recordings were uploaded (on Moodle) and group sessions were organised where students worked with the material covered in the recordings. Students, as well, had a choice of attending the group sessions either in a classroom or in an online setting.

In this presentation an introduction will be given on the results of a survey were students were asked about flipped learning as a teaching method, using the experience from the course Spoken and Written Language. The main question for which an answer is sought is: How does it work to use flipped learning at the university level? What do the students think about flipped learning as a teaching methodology? The focus of the presentation will be on the students’ experience of the online lectures and the group sessions they took part in; how they value them, how they value this form of teaching and the question of whether this teaching method was successful in the course.