Block ‘n’ flip: boosting student engagement in the HE classroom
Block ‘n’ flip: boosting student engagement in the HE classroom
Nicoletta Di Ciolla; Dr Chrissi Nerantzi; and Dr Gerasimos Chatzidamianos
What is the idea?
Actively and pro-actively involving students in their learning, providing them with a supportive environment, is key to student empowerment, autonomous learning and development.
One of Manchester Metropolitan University’s (ManMet) core strategies to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the student experience, to which engagement is a core contributor, was to configure learning and teaching into “blocks”. Thus, the academic year was divided into four six-week teaching blocks, each occupied by 30 credits worth of content, and followed by one assessment week (Nerantzi & Chatzidamianos, 2020; Nerantzi et al., 2021). Academics worried that, by condensing and intensifying learning, teaching and assessment, this structure would cause insurmountable difficulties: the challenges seemed more daunting than the opportunities were exciting. The inevitable re-think of teaching and learning approaches searched for alternative pedagogical practices that would secure students’ engagement and success despite learning being operationalised remotely (and in isolation) and intensively. The main questions were: how could we ensure that students stayed on the course, remained engaged and participative? What alternative to the traditional campus-based provision could we offer that would be equally effective, or better still deliver additional, unexpected benefits?
The authors’ idea was to adopt peer- assisted, flipped learning, approaches that encouraged active learning, that could help create a seamless learning experience within and beyond the physical and virtual classroom, and at the same time remove some of the problems created by the block delivery (Nerantzi, 2020). We called this approach Block ‘n’ Flip.
Keeping in mind that our objectives were to:
- deliver depth and breadth (subject content) and develop higher order critical thinking skills in far less time than usual; and
- enable students to become autonomous learners,
- we redesigned our units to:
- make interaction an integral part of the Teaching & Learning (T&L) philosophy;
- distribute learning activities across the pre-, during and post-class stages (Ehlers, 2020; Scott, 2020), exploiting the potential of technology to make this happen;
- promote active blended learning; and
- align all learning activities and assessment constructively with the learning outcomes.
This approach enabled us to reduce reliance on teaching as telling (i.e. to move away from teaching events where student participation mostly implies mechanical note-taking, with minimum active engagement) and to use class time for scaffolded learning activities instead. Flipped learning and peer assisted learning strategies with synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities were key to achieving our objectives.
The following pages illustrate how the above plan was put into practice by o