Flipped classroom approach to ophthalmology clerkship courses for Chinese students of eight-year program

For centuries, didactic teaching sections have occupied a large proportion of the available teaching-learning time in medical courses. This form of teaching has relied heavily on professors disseminating information through lectures and students passively absorbing knowledge for a majority of the class period. The extensive use of traditional lectures limits students’ time to actively learn, synthesize, analyze, and develop critical thinking skills. Attempts to make the precious teaching-learning time more efficient and to promote student involvement in active learning led to the evolution of the “flipped classroom” or “inverted classroom” approach (1). The term “flipped classroom,” which was introduced in 2007, has been rapidly gaining popularity in the educational research literature worldwide (2,3). As its name suggests, the “flipped classroom” is an inverted model of teaching that often uses communication or instructional technologies such as videos, podcasts or slides to deliver lecture material outside the classroom, so that classroom time is spent on discussion, analysis, and problem-solving activities (4). The “flipped classroom” Original Article