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The Education 4.0 era represents a “tipping point” of rapid growth as a paradigm shift, providing an accelerated launching of onine learning for higher education characterized by ventures into blended, distributed and open distance e-learning (ODeL) (World Economic Forum, 2015; 2016; Rojewski & Hill, 2017; Yusuf & Nur, 2019). This requires according to Makridakis (2017) that academics need to respond to the “exponential power” of Education 4.0 technologies (Hussin, 2018; Fick, 2017). For consistency, the term “flipped learning” is used throughout this paper. The growing body of literature is reporting positive results when it comes to flipped learning” which across disciplines and contexts involves student-centered, technology-integrated teaching. Empirically, flipped classroom pedagogy of flip learning reports positive evidence in contact teaching (Shyr & Chen, 2018; Bergmann & Sams, 2014; Arnold-Garza, 2014). Followed by blended distance learning environments (Gloudeman, Shah-Manek, Wong, & Ip, 2018; Stöhr, Demazière, & Adawi, 2020) – and, to a lesser extent, the distance education context (Graf, Kinshuk & Liu, 2009; Yusuf & Nur, 2019). The Education 4.0 technologies exponentially continue to grow rapidly in open distance e-learning spaces (Fick, 2017; van Wyk, 2018). At these open distance e-learning spaces, new technologies and applications are being developed to support students’ personalized learning (López Belmonte, Guerrero, Sánchez 2020; World Economic Forum, 2017). In support of the latter challenging notions of online pedagogy, in particular, the processes involved in “flipped” learning, and how students learn in an open distance e-learning environment necessitated this inquiry. To successfully, embrace the Education 4.0 paradigm in a socially sustainable way lecturers will need to transform their praxis and rethink the implementation of existing curricula. The researcher opines that it is imperative to capacitate student teachers with digital literacy competencies, digital e-tools, and Education 4.0 technologies for the Education 4.0. Collectively, these empirical evidence presented important insights into the flipped classroom peadagy. This paper seeks to examine the impact of the development of a flipped instructional design (FID) as an online pedagogy on students’ learning. To achieve this purpose, the research questions are:
• How do students experience the flipped instructional design as an online pedagogy on students’ learning in an ODeL teacher education course?
• To what extent does the flipped instructional design enables students in modeling to teach the Teaching Methodology of Economics course?
• How do Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) vs Batchelor of Education (Bed) student-teachers views statistically significantly different in the use of the FID as an ODeL supportive strategy?
• How do students encounter non-responsive support and accessibility challenges when using the flipped instructional design?