To-flip or not-to-flip in blended learning: Students’ perceptions on what matters most

The prevalence of educational technology has made blended learning the new normal in the education realm. Among the many formats of blended learning, the flipped classroom model is perhaps the most widely used one. Flipped classrooms have been shown to enhance students’ autonomy (Campillo-Ferrer & Miralles-Martinez, 2021), achievement of learning outcomes (Bredow et al., 2021), etc., and come with challenges, such as technological barriers (Lo & Hew, 2017) and faculty/students’ dissatisfaction with the workload (Han, 2022; Låg & Sæle, 2019). To assess the suitability of this model in the context of Singapore, this study investigates a local university’s students’ perception on what matters most to their learning amidst the move towards blended learning. In this study, the students were exposed to two different blended learning designs: a flipped classroom design (week 1-4) and a workshop design (week 6-10), completed two equally weighted writing assessments and two surveys in week 5 and week 11, respectively. A Wilcoxon sign rank test revealed a significant difference between the two assessment marks (Z = 4.25, p =< 0.001) with 73.2% of the students scoring higher on week 11 assessment. The survey results indicated that 81% of the participants preferred the workshop design, citing the immediate response/customized guidance by the tutor and the easily perceivable direct relevance of the learning materials and activities as the main reasons for their preference. This presentation will provide detailed elaboration of students’ perceptions on blended learning designs and what matters most to them in the learning.