Switching to flipped classrooms – one and the same training challenged by practitioners and students

ABSTRACT

By inverting the knowledge transfer process, flipped classroom trainings promise a richer learning experience and, ultimately, an enhanced learning process. The objective of this article is to present design guidelines that help lecturers make their flipped classroom trainings more user-centric. We take an accounting information system (AIS)-related lecture at a university as our case example and consider two types of learners for the same training, that is practitioners and students. Significant differences emerged. For example, practitioners cherished self-contained learning at their own pace, whereas most of the students asked for a motivated lecturer to give direction. Our results are clustered threefold: (1) User perception – getting the method right is as important as the content; (2) Lecturer – developing soft skills beyond mere knowledge transfer; (3) Technology – setting the scene properly when switching to flipped classroom trainings.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• blended learning
• flipped classroom training
• practitioners and students
• requirements
• design guidelines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Besides the four types of DSR in IS artefacts identified by March and Smith (1995) – constructs, models, methods, and instantiations – we propose complementary design guidelines. In contrast to design principles which are ‘ … statements that prescribe what and how to build an artifact in order to achieve a preferred design goal’ (Chandra et al., 2015; Seidel et al., 2017), our design guidelines have a more recommendatory and adaptive character to drive future discussions (Hevner et al., 2004). For research purposes, they contribute to theories that specify how artefacts should be designed based on kernel theories (Vaishnavi & Kuechler, 2015). For practice, they should help lecturers to improve their flipped classroom training. However, we advise against mandatory or routine use. Researchers must be creative and carefully judge when, where, and how to apply our guidelines in their specific work (Klein & Myers, 1999).

2 The implementation of S/4HANA is currently top ranked on the IS project list. It is a new enterprise resource planning/business intelligence (ERP/BI) generation based on in-memory technology. It will replace the SAP R/3 ‘industry’ standard (SAP, 2020a). However, many companies struggle to determine whether such a multi-million IS investment will have a positive return (Colas et al., 2014). Thus, it was an interesting topic for our AIS-related lecture.

3 Based on the senior scholars’ basket of leading IS Journals (AIS, 2020b): European Journal of Information Systems; Information Systems Research; Information Systems Journal; Journal of the Association for Information Systems; Journal of Information Technology; Journal of Management Information Systems; Journal of Strategic Information Systems; MIS Quarterly.

4 Focusing on leading educational journals, we used the Scimago Journal Ranking (2020). We selected the subject area ‘all subject areas’ and, herein, the subject category ‘education.’ The resulting top 50 journal ranking includes outlets such as the Review of Educational Research, Educational Researcher, and Educational Research Review as well as Accounting Education, Journal of Accounting Education, and Issues in Accounting Education.

5 We followed the Association of Information Systems (AIS, 2020a): Americas Conference on Information Systems; European Conference on Information Systems; International Conference on Information Systems; Pacific and Asia Conference on Information Systems.

6 Only for ##6, 7, 9 the differences between the ex-ante requirements of the participants in 2020 and 2021 are significant. The two-sided p-value for #6 is p = .021, for #7 is p = .019, and for #9 is p = .002. Regarding the ex-post experiences only #7 shows a significant difference (p < .001) between 2020 and 2021 participants.