Extension Project Based on Flipped Classroom to the Development of Hard and Soft Skills in Brazilian Outskirts: Case studies

Abstract

The pandemic has brought many consequences for society, especially in education for those that are less fortunate. In Brazil, public policy measures taken weren't enough to help an expressive percentual number of students in their academy journey during the pandemic. Giving this, this paper presents a teaching-learning model based on flipped classroom to the development of hard and soft skills in universities students and young people from Brazilian outskirts, helping to fill the gap left by the insufficient educational formation during the pandemic and encouraging them to start a higher education, especially in the IT market, which is a promising area with many opportunities. In the proposed model, university students learn by themselves, instructed by professors, about IT area content and then, beyond bringing the content to be discussed in the classroom, from the traditional flipped classroom method, they also have to give lessons about the content they learned to underprivileged young people from the outskirts. Three case studies were carried out by this paper, with outskirts from three states of Brazil. Results show that the model is scalable and therefore, can be applied in different communities with small adaptations. It could be observed that university students developed many skills by participating on the project and young people from the outskirts learned new contents, developed their confidence and their motivation to start higher education and some of them even got job opportunities because of the project. The study demonstrated a class attendance rate exceeding 70%, with over 75% of students from the three case studies expressing satisfaction with their participation in the project.