The Effect of a Flipped Classroom in a SPOC: Students' Perceptions and Attitudes

Abstract

The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) has brought opportunities to higher education institutions. Despite this, one of the main drawbacks of MOOCs and SPOCs has been relatively low retention rate of the registered students. Having this in mind in this paper we report our research efforts with a SPOC on Applied Machine Learning specifically tailored for professional students. More concretely, we report our findings with regard to the effects of the flipped classroom approach on the students' perceptions and attitudes. The initial results show that flipping the class had direct effects on students' knowledge and skills compared to a fully online class setting. These findings have offered complementary explanations of the survey regression analysis which revealed that course structure/instructional approach followed by course content are the main drivers in accounting for the variance in students' overall perceptions of the course.