Students’ Satisfaction with a Blended Instructional Design: The Potential of “Flipped Classroom” in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the impact on promoting student satisfaction and improving their involvement in their own learning when applying a “Flipped classroom” design in a first-year bilingual, English-taught module in a non-English-speaking country. “World Economy” is taught in the Faculty of Business and Economics at a traditional, face-to-face (F2F) Spanish publicly-funded institution, the University of Oviedo (Spain). It is a bilingual module, where English is the medium of instruction and evaluation to a cohort of Spanish-speaking freshers. During 2013–14, the instructional designers implemented a “Flipped Classroom” design for this module: content delivery through videos in English of the different module topics, pre-class questionnaires answered through the University Virtual Learning Environment, instructor mediation between students and content through mini-lectures and Just-in-Time Teaching, student-centred active learning approach for in-class sessions, and individual practice combined with peer-instruction mediated by the instructor. Therefore, the design targets module contents, skills practice and improvement of students’ linguistic skills.