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What are some of the advantages of flipped learning?

Central to the concept of flipped learning is enabling the best use of valuable staff-student contact time.

The aim in rethinking how teacher-led content is delivered is to allow more collaborative, engaging, and responsive teaching and learning activities during staff/student contact time.

Across a broad range of studies a number of advantages have been identified with 'flipped learning' approaches.

Pedagogy and learning

  • Flipped learning is most likely to lead to improvements in student performance and reduced failure rates when it is used as part of an overall strategy to create a more active learning experience.

  • Where appropriately planned and implemented, flipped learning strategies can give students opportunities to take greater ownership for their learning: fostering their independent learning skills, their ability to collaborate with peers, and empowering them to make more engaged and constructive use of staff-student contact time.

  • Flipped learning can give students more time to process and reflect on concepts and develop their underlying knowledge before coming to class to apply their learning.

  • Flipping sections of a module or programme can add variety and opportunities for new teaching approaches, making the course more engaging and intellectually satisfying for both students and lecturers.

Inclusion and accessibility

  • Providing more learning content asynchronously can allow students greater flexibility in how they interact with those materials. It enables learners to review, revisit and engage with learning materials at their own pace.

  • Pre-development of learning materials as part of a flipped learning strategy can facilitate the creation of resources that ensure the accessibility of this content for diverse needs – particularly where learning materials are developed with a view to re-use.

Scalability and flexibility

  • Flipped learning can contribute to addressing timetabling pressures upon staff and teaching facilities, for example by reducing the need for large (e.g. lectures of 60+ students) and/or multiple synchronous timetabled events.

  • By changing the balance between asynchronous and synchronous learning activity within a module, flipped learning can facilitate greater scalability of a module in terms of student numbers and support. In some circumstances, this may allow an increase in cohort sizes. In other contexts, it may expand opportunities for additional student support as a result of released staff time.

  • The introduction of flipped learning to sections of an existing module or programme can provide a manageable starting-point that provides building blocks towards more extensive blended and digital learning approaches.


Additional resources