Flipped classrooms (FC) is one of the modern innovative teaching methods, which has become very popular in the recent years. The basic idea of the FC is to let students learn theory at home (by watching presentations online, reading books, etc.) and then use class time to answer questions , explain most difficult things and work on exercises together . FC fits perfectly with the concept of problem based learning, providing more efficient use of valuable time and increasing productivity for students and lectures.

Despite many advantages, the flipped classrooms have some shortcomings as well. The two biggest challenges are the amount of time used to "flip" a class and prepare all materials for a teacher and a possible lack of motivation to learn theory at home for students. We believe that both can be well adressed using tools from another modern teaching innovation - Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).

MOOC ideology was specifically created to provide learning possibilities online without direct contact with teacher . Openness and flexibility of MOOC can be perfectly combined with PBL approach. One of MOOC's biggest advantages is an IT platform developed to make the process of creating and providing course materials (videos supplemented with tests, pencasts, quizzes, etc.) efficiently. In addition to that, such platforms usually have excellent tools to follow students' activity and control their level of knowledge and understanding during the course. The flipped classroom teaching in a MOOC platform can also be used for cross-campus teaching, which is widely used at Department of Chemistry and Bioscience (as well as at several other departments) , because it is represented at all three campuses.

The main goal of this project is to combine FC and MOOC for better implementation of PBL in everyday study. To achieve this, we will investigate how the use of MOOC platform can improve the efficiency of the Flipped Classrooms. For this purpose we are going to utilize Open edX (https://open.edx.org) -open source solution from MIT and Harward Universtity, one of the most popular among MOOC providers. One of the biggest advantages of Open edX is a possibility to deploy course components (or the whole course) in any other instance of the platform. So one can easily share the components and courses with other departments or/and universities.

PROJEKTANSVARLIG

Sergey Kucheryavskiy, svk@bio.aau.dk

PROJEKTDELTAGERE

Jens Laurids Sørensen