A Flipped Learning Approach Using Social Media in Health Informatics Education

Social media have become an important aspect of people’s everyday life. Despite the popularity of social media networks and applications, only few educators utilize them to improve teaching and learning. A flipped learning is an innovative approach that changes the traditional way of delivering lectures in the classroom by inverting the instructional cycle so that students can gain knowledge before the class. This paper presents a flipped learning approach for teaching using social media. Students were exposed to the lecture content before the class in a collaborative and interactive learning environment using a well-known social media application. The course instructor served as a facilitator rather than a dominator for the instructional process. The proposed approach was applied to teach an undergraduate introductory course on health informatics, a dynamic and emerging academic discipline. In this paper, a focus group research technique was utilized to evaluate the educational effectiveness of this approach. The results of the evaluation revealed that students were comfortable and satisfied that this approach helped them understand the course concepts in an interactive and collaborative learning environment. The results of the study also identified some educational benefits as well as limitations and drawbacks of using social media as a flipped learning approach. These results can provide an educational framework to improve the implementation of flipped learning approaches using social media.