Currently, there is a set of information and communication technologies (ICTs) available for improving student learning, whose use is considered essential to increase student satisfaction (O’Flaherty & Phillips, 2015). ICTs increase students’ ease of access to online resources before attending class (Ng, 2018). These resources can be generated by the teachers themselves, although freely accessible materials can also be used (e.g., YouTube, Khan Academy, Ted Talks, MIT Open Courseware). With the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, digital content can be reused and created in forms such as wikis, blogs, reports, videos and images. We can define user-generated content broadly, but in this context, we mean specifically student-generated content (SGC) (Yang et al., 2016). ICTs have also modified the evaluation process, from unidirectional to multidirectional (self, peer and teacher). Electronic questionnaires enable instant feedback and can also be used to ascertain students’ prior knowledge before attending class.
Flipped classroom
Since teaching no longer focuses on the teacher’s knowledge but on the active participation of the student, the flipped classroom (FC) methodology is increasingly used (Lundin, Rensfeldt, Hillman, Lantz-Andersson, & Peterson, 2018). This method is inspired by the idea of inverting traditional teaching by replacing a teacher-centred approach by an approach in which activities previously performed outside the classroom now occur within the classroom (Akçayır & Akçayır, 2018; Lundin et al., 2018; Nouri, 2016; O’Flaherty & Phillips, 2015) That is, instead of attending class and working at home afterwards, now, students first access the material (through formats such as videos, texts, links, and repositories) and then conduct different learning activities in the classroom (e.g., analysis, discussions, problem solving, answering questionnaires, learning advanced concepts). Hence, autonomous learning is encouraged through the completion of preparatory work, while class time is more interactive and productive (O’Flaherty & Phillips, 2015).
Many research and review articles have named the advantages of the FC, particularly in a recent work by Akçayır and Akçayır (2018). In terms of learning outcomes: the FC improves learning and enhances student satisfaction and, to a lesser extent, enhances students’ confidence, promotes their creativity and improves their problem-solving abilities. Student satisfaction improves because the FC allows greater interaction with the teacher and other students and facilitates more individualized learning. Most importantly, though, the FC modifies the students’ learning habits. Some studies highlight the fact that students are better prepared before class. However, the lack of preparation of certain students before class, either due to difficulties or lack of time or motivation, has also been identified as the most common disadvantage of the FC. To take advantage of the benefits of the FC and ensure adequate pre-class preparation, students must previously complete a brief task or a questionnaire (le Roux & Nagel, 2018). Some of the tasks associated with the FC according to our proposed methodology also involve evaluating the content consulted or proposing questions about the content.
This model requires a greater investment of time from both students and teachers. The use of pre-existing resources such as Khan Academy videos (Khan Academy Free Online Courses, Lessons & Practice, 2019) or material from other institutions or social media can reduce the teacher’s workload (O’Flaherty & Phillips, 2015). Our proposal also includes reusable SGC.
The effect of the FC depends on its specific implementation (Schwarzenberg, Navon, Nussbaum, Pérez-Sanagustín, & Caballero, 2018). An important task is to specify pre-class and class activities (Bishop & Verleger, 2013; Le Roux & Nagel, 2018). Students increase their commitment because of the activities conducted in class, not because of the FC (Le Roux & Nagel, 2018). That is, to ensure the FC is effective, it is more important to focus on the selection of active learning strategies to be used in class than on developing online videos or other out-of-class materials. It is necessary to consider which activities will be most conducive to learning and whether such activities are better performed before, during or after the face-to-face session, and the types of interactions with the material and between the students that are desirable. In our proposal, we use FC along with other techniques such as SGC and PR. For example, as a pre-class activity, the generation of questions can be proposed and as an activity to be carried out in class, the answer to the proposals made by other students. If the material used for FC has been made by other students, the PR can be proposed as a previous activity and the generation of new content as a subsequent activity.
Peer review
Peer assessment or peer review (PR) is the process whereby students evaluate the work or achievements of their peers. The assessment can consider the level, merit, quality or success of the products or the learning outcomes of colleagues in analogous situations (Topping, 2003). There is no single way to implement PR (Gielen et al., 2011). The objective can be formative but need not be. It can be performed quantitatively or qualitatively, with or without feedback. All students can be evaluators and can be evaluated, or only some students can evaluate all their peers or some of their peers, and evaluations may or may not be performed anonymously. In recent years, interest in peer- and self-review as a method to encourage collaboration among students and to promote greater student involvement in the learning-teaching process has grown (Agrawal & Rajapakse, 2018; Chang, Tseng, & Lou, 2012; Chen et al., 2009; Domínguez, Jaime, Sánchez, Blanco, & Heras, 2016; Ion, Barrera-Corominas, & Tomàs-Folch, 2016; Jaime et al., 2016; Li et al., 2016; Panadero & Brown, 2017; Wanner & Palmer, 2018).
The use of ICTs also favours implanting the PR through online tools that allow assigning, collecting and communicating the students’ assessments immediately (Li, Liu, & Steckelberg, 2010; Søndergaard & Mulder, 2012). In certain cases, ICTs are used for practical reasons because the PR enables providing sufficient feedback in a reasonable time when working with a considerable number of students, as in massive open online courses (MOOCs), or facilitating individual assessment within a work team (Falchikov, 2004; Willmot, Pond, Loddington, & Palermo, 2008). Beyond the interest in obtaining different peer grades and quickly, the PR is of interest for formative and collaborative learning (Søndergaard & Mulder, 2012; Strijbos & Sluijsmans, 2010). It helps participants build skills for discerning what constitutes quality performance (Van Zundert, Sluijsmans, & Van Merriënboer, 2010). These skills are necessary in Higher Education in the twenty-first century (Wanner & Palmer, 2018.) To perform such assessments responsibly, the learning environment must enable students to feel comfortable and involved in the learning process (McGarr & Clifford, 2013; Rotsaert, Panadero, & Schellens, 2018). These assessments moreover require that the design and implementation should be performed reflectively to ensure their effectiveness (Wanner & Palmer, 2018). In addition, performing the assessments requires practising (Panadero, 2016) to accomplish higher quality reviews. Another variant of the PR is the one concerning privacy. It can be done anonymously or not. Anonymity may reduce the pressure of the relationship with peers, but a non-anonymous assessment may require a more serious and reflective assessment and it is more in line with a formative use of the PR. It can be established an anonymous phase followed by a non-anonymous phase. When a transition from an anonymous to a non-anonymous peer assessment environment is facilitated, students’ peer feedback quality in the anonymous phase increases over time and the peer feedback quality in the non-anonymous sessions eventually becomes comparable (Rotsaert et al., 2018). Furthermore, an anonymous review does not reflect reality, as people give and receive feedback with known identities (Panadero & Brown, 2017). Our proposal thus supports non-anonymous assessments. Finally, students value the review process better if it is also valued (Wanner & Palmer, 2018).
Many studies conclude that PR exhibit a high level of validity. Although some nuances can be added, such as that peer and teacher ratings are more similar when it is an overall judgement based on well-defined criteria or rubrics (Falchikov & Goldfinch, 2000). The correlation is significantly higher when the course is graduate level rather than undergraduate or the PR is non-anoymous (Li et al., 2016), when the self-assessment is distinguished the validity tends to be a little lower and more variable (Topping, 2003). Despite the high level of reliability, some educators still have little confidence in their use (Agrawal & Rajapakse, 2018). Biases and competitive effects may result when, for example, students do not belong to the same university (Domínguez et al., 2016).
We use PR for strictly educational purposes. We use a non-anonymous form of PR to provide qualitative comments or quantitative values or both as part of the course requirements. Hence, we do not recommend that assessment received of their peers will affect the final grade of the evaluated students. These decisions were made with the intention of encouraging students to assess the quality responsibly, while minimizing their preoccupations regarding grades or the influence of students’ good or bad relationship with their peers. In our case, we do not value all the students’ work, but select a group that is not typically the most exemplary, as we agree with Verleger, Rodgers, and Diefes-Dux (2016) that experts should assess the work of students producing lower quality work to enhance learning and the evaluation process. The evaluations are commented on in a collective session. The students consider the teacher’s involvement in the process as crucial because they do not consider themselves experts (Wanner & Palmer, 2018).
Generating video content
The use of videos in education has evolved over time. A simple use is the recording or substitution of the teacher’s class, with the advantage that students can attend the class when and where they prefer and see what they do not understand again. Videos have also been incorporated as sources of external information. That is, they are used for the same purpose but are not made by teachers. As mentioned, in recent years, this ability of both teachers and students to produce videos has allowed videos to be incorporated into the classroom through the FC methodology (Bishop & Verleger, 2013).
Technological advances have enabled the production of good videos and their visualization at any time and in any place, in turn helping increase student participation in the learning process. Students have begun to be producers of videos in the academic context, and though this trend was initially more evident in the field of humanities and education, it is occurring equally in engineering classes (Greene, 2014). Some examples can be found in (Chewar & Matthews, 2016), for instance, a demo mode to replace the presentation of a computer project or a guided tour of a computer system or a presentation of students’ projects in education (Kerimkulova et al., 2016).
The creation of videos according to Bloom’s taxonomy adapted to the digital age (Churches, 2008) requires mobilizing higher-order, high-level cognitive thinking skills, which include understanding, planning, filming, direction, creation, combination and cooperation. Because university students, regardless of discipline, can be considered digital natives (Akçayır & Akçayır, 2018), they should not encounter difficulties in producing videos. Video production allows students to express themselves in a way that makes them feel more comfortable, thus increasing their motivation and stimulating more imaginative creations (Droumeva & Murphy, 2016). However, it requires practice and experience that not everyone possesses, as using video technology to socialize with friends is not identical to learning and developing critical thinking or communication skills. Another benefit of the use of video creation by students is that it can also facilitate experimentation, active engagement and reflection using subjective experience as a motor for learning (Van Noy, James, & Bedley, 2016).
Studies have already been conducted on students’ experience as video producers comparing them to other types of deliverables in university contexts. Thus, if students can choose between performing a written work or a video, those who choose the video option valued their experience better in certain cases (Khalid, 2014; Smith, 2014); equally, others may prefer written work (Genereux, 2014; Orús et al., 2016) due more to differences in the time and effort involved or how the work is factored into the evaluation than to technical difficulties.
Our proposal combines student video generation with peer review. With peer review students strive to create and do produce higher quality videos because of the social pressure of peer scrutiny (Greene, 2014; Smith, 2014). In our case, the reuse and evaluations by classmates of student-generated videos (SGV) both in the course itself and in subsequent academic courses is fundamental.
Generating questions
Student-generated questions (SGQ) are learning activities in which students generate a set of questions that correspond to specific prior instruction or experiences that they consider important and relevant from the educational perspective, focusing on self-assessment and PR goals (Yu & Wu, 2016). The creation of SGQs requires metacognitive strategies because creating questions requires locating materials that are considered important and relevant; adequately formulating questions; providing multiple responses or alternative answers; carefully formulating questions to address and evaluate specific learning outcomes; answering the questions that are generated; forging links between the current study material and previously learned subjects/units; creating examples of any focal concept; developing plans and strategies to generate questions according to specific criteria; monitoring one’s understanding; modifying plans and/or strategies to correct unsatisfactory learning in the generation of questions; and assessing one’s understanding of the study material (Yu & Wu, 2016). SGQs also help teachers assess the quality of students’ knowledge and reveal what students have learned, and uncover misunderstandings (Aflalo, 2018). ICTs also enable the collection and assessment of such information with tools such as PeerWise (Kay, Hardy, & Galloway, 2018). In addition, students can benefit from questions that are answered by their peers and a bank of questions that are available for reviewing knowledge before the exam (Aflalo, 2018). However, not all questions generated are quality questions, as training is required for achieving quality questions. In the Afalo study, 60% joined the course website. Students who had no practice generating questions were surprised to realize how difficult they found this activity (Aflalo, 2018; Barak & Asakle, 2018). In the Barak & Asakle study, most of the questions generated were classified as having a moderate level of difficulty.
This activity can be linked to the PR because the students can evaluate the questions contributed by other students. Yu and Wu (2016) found that students who provide quality feedback also generate high quality questions.
Generating other types of content
Many forms of digital learning content exist in addition to those described in the previous sections. The entries in a blog or wiki, for example, represent another format worth considering, particularly because such formats are often used as a source of active consultation in technical or health subjects.
Whereas blog content is generally performed by one person or a group of people, wikis are spaces where community members access, create, edit, modify, eliminate, and share information. The co-creation of knowledge extends through linked pages and enables collaborative writing. The most notorious example of the use of wikis is Wikipedia. In addition to possessing sufficient digital knowledge (Matthew, Felvegi, & Callaway, 2009), it is necessary to properly conduct student assessments to assure the quality of the selected content (Trentin, 2009) and to perform several iterations to be more effective (Zheng, Niiya, & Warschauer, 2015). Likewise (Zheng et al., 2015) echo other authors when they stress that good instructional design is vital to ensure the success of learning activities facilitated by this type of methodology.
Activities that include blogs and wikis improve students’ writing skills (de Almeida-Soares, 2008), foster linguistic improvement of second languages (Wang & Camilla, 2012), encourage more reflective and critical constructions about what students have learned and favour the application of learning to new situations, all of which are essential for succeeding in their competitive and changing future classes (Wheeler, 2010).
In computer science, the creation or collaborative maintenance of software through forums or blogs deepens the commitment to learning through the act of authorship because the awareness of an audience, regardless of how virtual or tentative, encourages more reflective contributions (Wheeler, Yeomans, & Wheeler, 2008). If, in addition, that audience is composed by other students of the same course or future classes, students may display greater self-motivation. Hence, this content creation system can be used to share information such as lessons learned (LL). The specific technology used, e.g., Twitter, wikis, forums, or blog posts, will depend on the learning context and subject.