An Investigation of Design Features for Inverted Classroom Support Technology

New technologies and teaching approaches are having enormous effects on education practices. The inverted classroom has emerged as an exciting unconventional approach to structuring a classroom environment to enhance active learning. This model allows instructors to provide engaging content but also to cater to different learning styles by reserving more classroom time for interaction and problemsolving. Many learning responsibilities are correspondingly shifted to the student, which leads to a sense of autonomy. The implementation of the inverted classroom pedagogy varies depending on the instructor, learning objectives, activities, content, and available teaching resources. Instructors use whatever technologies are provided to enable and complement this pedagogy; at this point there is no analysis or recommendation of standard design features for tools that can best support this teaching method. Using interviews as a way to extract rich and detailed experiences from instructors who have implemented this pedagogy, and Activity Theory as an interpretive theoretical lens, we are investigating current practices surrounding inverted classrooms to (1) understand the phenomenon as a whole; and (2) elicit design requirements for tools that can support and enhance this pedagogy.