2.1. Effectiveness of the Flipped Classroom
The flipped classroom was explored initially as a means to improve teaching and learning effectiveness and to optimize the lecturing period in physical classrooms, by replacing physical in-class activities with interactive academic activities (Bergmann and Sams, 2012). The flipped classroom is significantly different from the traditional one. The prominent feature of the flipped classroom is that it focuses on student-centered learning rather than teacher-centered learning characteristic of the traditional pedagogy. The flipped approach requires students to learn on their own before they physically enter the classroom. They can use the information technologies to communicate with peers and teachers before class so that the self-directed learning and independent study can be realized. The online learning activities should be strictly supervised and carefully recorded in order to make sure that students concentrate on learning by themselves even they are not directly faced with teachers and students.
The teaching and learning effectiveness of the flipped approach has been explored by numerous studies across various disciplines and different educational levels (e.g. Bishop and Verleger, 2013; Lo and Hew, 2017). The majority of studies reported that the flipped classroom could yield benefits to teaching and learning in terms of academic condition improvements (Aidinopoulou and Sampson, 2017), learning outcome enhancement (Kong, 2014), skill development (Tanner and Scott, 2015) and motivational encouragement (Sahin, Cavlazoglu, and Zeytuncu, 2015). Learners believed the flipped classroom endowed them with a more positive learning experience and higher engagement in seven aspects: commitment to peers, being recognized, feeling safe, instructor relationship, physical learning environment, learning with peers and using videos to learn new contents (Steenutheim and Foldnes, 2018).