Traditional lecture-led models have long dominated higher education; however, these methods are being replaced by more active, outcome-focused approaches, which are considered more effective for teaching students the higher-order skills needed in real-life situations. In addition, advancements in educational technology and the rise of online learning increasingly demand models able to provide flexible and innovative learning solutions. (1)

In this landscape, the flipped classroom model is gaining significant attention (2) due to its emphasis on flexible delivery, students’ active engagement, and deeper learning. In a nutshell, this model proposes that students acquire foundational knowledge independently while educators use in-class time to facilitate deeper thinking through interactive and collaborative activities.

But what design considerations should educators make when considering the implementation of the flipped classroom online?

Flipping the classroom in an online course

In the UCL online environment, educators can use Moodle to shift foundational activities to asynchronous formats (like pre-recorded lectures, readings, quizzes, and preparatory assignments), allowing students to access and complete them in their own time. This frees up valuable live (synchronous) class time for interactive sessions. Educators can then use video conferencing tools and web platforms (such as Teams, Zoom, Mentimeter, chats, breakout rooms, and editable documents) to foster knowledge application through discussions, collaborative exercises, and practice-based activities.

A significant feature of flipping the classroom is the focus shift from passive learning during class (such as lectures) to interactive activities (like problem-solving, and analysis). This change can be challenging for students accustomed to traditional lecture-based methods, and students may struggle to adjust (3). It is essential that educators set clear expectations, are realistic about students’ efforts to prepare for the live sessions, and coherently design asynchronous and synchronous components.

Initial considerations

The flipped method doesn’t mean students are teaching themselves; by undertaking preparatory activities independently, they only get a baseline understanding; the skills to apply conceptual knowledge are done in class. To begin with, educators need to decide which course components benefit asynchronous learning and which benefit from real-time interaction. To guide this process, educators should assess the course and audience-specific needs, including:

• Course outcomes: What level of knowledge and skills should students attain? (4)
• Activities: What activities (discussions, projects, quizzes, lectures) will best support students’ learning?
• Subject matter complexities: How can I scaffold learning to gradually build mastering? What are the subject matter pain points?
• Challenges students may encounter: Do students have the prerequisite knowledge to complete tasks? What materials can I provide to address knowledge gaps?
• Feedback: How and when will I provide feedback to guide students’ learning progress?
• Technology: Do students have access to reliable technology and internet connectivity?
• Are the tools accessible to all students?

Asynchronous learning: Building foundational knowledge

Asynchronous learning is ideal for content acquisition, such as explaining theories, technical demonstrations, background reading, or audio interviews with experts. By allocating targeted self-paced content to asynchronous formats, educators can allow learners to access and revisit the material at their own pace and direct them to material relevant to the live sessions.

However, material such as short, pre-recorded lectures can be passive and not particularly memorable. Educators can use technology to foster understanding, address the knowledge gap, and improve retention. For example:

• Interspersing short video lectures with questions or quizzes
• Combining readings with poll questions
• Using frequent low-stakes quizzes with feedback
• Ask students to revisit a process and reflect on their learning

Asynchronous learning can also be used to promote student-led learning,  engaging them in activities that encourage exploration and collaboration, such as contributing to discussion forums, brainstorming in group settings, or preparing questions for expert Q&A sessions.

Supporting preparation for live sessions

To support learners in preparing adequately for more complex scenarios, educators can scaffold the learning process by implementing conditional releases of materials, ensuring that students complete foundational tasks and are then ready for more challenging scenarios.

Educators’ ongoing presence is essential to further guide and support students, and they can establish a strong presence in asynchronous components without being physically present. Using tools like automatic quiz feedback, personalised options such as video or audio summaries, monitoring discussion forums, establishing badges to reward participation, and offering targeted guidance can help keep students motivated and on track.

By monitoring these activities, educators can identify areas where students may struggle or excel, allowing for timely interventions and support, ensuring students are prepared for deeper engagement in live sessions.

Synchronous learning: Knowledge application

A key element of the flipped classroom approach is the seamless integration of foundational knowledge and deeper engagement in classroom activities. If there is a disconnect, students may struggle to see how their progress is shaping how theory connects to practice, leading to confusion, disengagement, and a fragmented learning experience.

While the primary focus of live sessions should be on applying knowledge and bridging theory and practice, educators should remain flexible and assess whether a short lecture is still needed to lay the groundwork for more advanced activities.

As educators reduce lecture time and shift foundational knowledge to asynchronous formats, their role in the live session becomes more of a facilitator. Observing students as they engage with the material and their peers allows educators to provide immediate feedback, address misconceptions, and help master the subject matter like a professional.

Activities can be time-consuming in live sessions, so planning for adequate quality time is essential. Educators can use technology to scaffold activities by breaking the learning process into smaller steps so that students can stay focused and complete the tasks within a set time. For example, educators can start with a Q&A session to activate prior knowledge, use breakout rooms to allow smaller groups to discuss a problem (providing instructions and outcomes expected), follow up with a worked example for the whole class and conclude with reflecting practice activity.

Getting started: Using a staggered approach

Flipping the classroom online is not merely about creating flexible learning opportunities for students; adopting this model requires a shift in how educators and students approach their roles. (5) Students must take more responsibility for their independent study and demonstrate achievement through contribution and collaboration, while educators must transition from being the primary source of knowledge to facilitators of learning.

Those changes are demanding (6); however, flipping the classroom does not have to be done in one go, and gradual implementation is possible. To make the transition smoother and more manageable, educators can start by flipping one or two weeks of their course, integrating targeted reading or research tasks, and gradually adopting more changes such as peer review or group work.

Whether starting with large-scale changes or small adjustments, students should understand how the model works and how their efforts align with the overall learning goals. To minimise students’ disengagement, components must be intentionally designed rather than added as an afterthought, and all elements should be clearly connected, appropriately scaffolded, and aligned with the intended learning outcomes.

Contact us to discover how our Learning Designers can help you create an engaging and effective learning experience.

1. Digital Education Market Size – By Learning Type (Self-paced, Instructor-led), By Course Type (STEM, Business Management, Others), By End User (Academic Institutions & Individuals, Enterprises) & Forecast, 2024 – 2032
2. Flipped classroom in higher education: a systematic literature review and research challenges.
3. Flipped Classroom Pedagogy | Teaching Commons (stanford.edu)
4. A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview.
5. Using technology to enable flipped classrooms whilst sustaining sound pedagogy.
6. The flipped classroom: A review of its advantages and challenges – ScienceDirect

The landscape of Higher Education has undergone a significant transformation in recent years, with online learning becoming an increasingly popular choice among adults. Recent publications including What do higher education students want from online learning? (2023) or Shaping the Future of Online Learning (2024) have highlighted the need for improvements in several key areas to enhance the quality and effectiveness of online education.

While academics bring essential expertise and deep knowledge of their content areas, transitioning to online learning environments can be challenging. This is where Learning Designers can help, offering specialised skills to optimise students’ online learning experience.

A common misconception about Learning Designers

Learning Designers are sometimes seen as tech-savvy professionals who manage the technical aspects of course delivery, such as uploading materials to platforms, video editing, or even coding. This perspective is understandable given the prominent role that digital technology plays in online learning; however, this perception can prevent academics from fully use the Learning Designers’ expertise.

Learning Designers are educational specialists with expertise in adult learning in online environments. Their primary focus is planning, designing, and strategically using educational technology to support teaching and learning.

Understanding the role of Learning Designers

Given their expertise, Learning Designers recognise that different modes of delivering education require distinct approaches.

While the foundational principles of learning are consistent across face-to-face and online contexts, directly replicating in-person methods online doesn’t work. For example, traditional classrooms benefit from face-to-face interactions, spontaneous discussions, and non-verbal cues. In the absence of these elements, online environments rely on technology to mediate interactions. This shift requires tailored strategies to engage students, maintain motivation, and ensure accessibility and success for all learners, regardless of background or ability.

Learning Designers can play a pivotal role in this process as they are skilled at tailoring the learning experience to meet the needs, challenges and motivations of adult learners and can combine pedagogy and technology to effectively support desired learning outcomes.

Technology meets pedagogy

Learning Designers typically work across different academic subjects but are not subject matter experts. Instead, they partner with academics to translate their expertise into engaging online courses.

Platforms like Moodle, for example, exemplify the potential of technology to support a learner-centred approach, allowing instructional strategies that combine passive and active learning. A passive learning activity might involve students watching a pre-recorded lecture or reading an article, where they absorb information independently. This can be complemented by an active learning component, such as summarising the content of the article, or participating in a discussion forum where students are encouraged to contribute their thoughts and engage in peer-to-peer dialogue.

However, academic presence remains a critical component of online courses. Tutors provide essential guidance, offer timely and constructive feedback, and support students in navigating the course material.

This integrated approach is linked to improved educational outcomes and a more engaging learning experience.

Designing for synchronous and asynchronous learning

Flexibility is crucial when designing online courses, particularly for adult learners who often require adaptable learning schedules or may join from different time zones.

Learning Designers focus on creating a seamless blend of synchronous and asynchronous components to maintain learner engagement while providing flexibility. They achieve this by assessing (in collaboration with academics) which activities are best suited for asynchronous delivery or synchronous interaction.

Moreover, Learning Designers can assist and address common challenges typically affecting synchronous sessions—such as students feeling unprepared or overwhelmed—by designing robust asynchronous activities that build the necessary knowledge and skills beforehand and by ensuring that activities build on each other and clearly align to the intended outcomes.

This careful blending of synchronous and asynchronous elements, coupled with well-designed support mechanisms like clear instructions, timely feedback, and additional resources, ensures that learners are equipped to actively participate and succeed in both activities.

Learning design is a collaborative endeavour

At UCL, we know that a great online course requires a carefully crafted experience that considers every aspect of the learner’s journey. That’s why Learning Designers work together with a team of experts.

We partner with academics to translate their expertise into engaging content and ensure learning outcomes are met. We work closely with Learning Technologists to select and implement digital tools, providing a seamless technical experience for staff and students. We liaise with multimedia developers and graphic designers when the course requires the production of assets such as video, animations, or interactive simulations.

This multi-faceted approach ensures that online courses are relevant, pedagogically sound, technically robust, accessible, and aesthetically appealing.

Ready to enhance your online course? Contact us to discover how our Learning Designers can help you create an engaging and effective learning experience.

 

Getting started

As we move our teaching materials online, we have is an opportunity to make more active use of Moodle. Moodle is already familiar to students and academic colleagues, but mainly as a repository for module materials and a place to upload assignments. Moodle has many other tools that can help keep your students engaged and learning in the absence of face-to-face sessions. The environment also provides student access to Blackboard Collaborate for online ‘tutorials’, Lecturecast Universal Capture Personal for short video recordings and the UCL reading list service. Both of these tools are key in UCL’s approach to teaching continuity.

UCL already has a well over 100 step-by-step Miniguides to help you set up and use all of the tools in Moodle, but as this may be a little overwhelming, this Toolkit focuses on a few simple enhancements can make a big difference to your students’ online experience.

Baseline

The first priority is always to check courses against the E-learning Baseline. Poor structuring of Moodle is an issue in terms of accessibility and student stress. The Baseline is now well-established at UCL and applying it helps students navigate online learning activities. Attention is particularly drawn to the first five sections of the Baseline;

• Structure.
• Orientation.
• Communication.
• Assessment.
• Resources.

Surveys show these are the elements of Moodle our students notice most and are often most critical of. They are also the easiest to improve.

How can we do more with Moodle?

This short (5’) video from an earlier post offers some excellent ideas.

The video has captions and a transcript.https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Play/22870

In addition to Collaborate and Lecturecast Universal Capture Personal, both very important to replace face-to-face sessions, three Moodle-specific ideas are mentioned.

• The first is Discussion Forums, often considered the mainstay of online learning. Many staff already use the News forum to announce exam dates and times; changes to exams, lectures or seminars; important information about coursework; and special announcements relating to events and when you post a message in the News Forum it will be emailed to enrolled students’ UCL email. The video refers to ‘Learning forums’ can be used for asynchronous discussion (i.e. not ‘real time’) and learning activities. They enable both staff and students to post and reply to posts and are usually are set to allow students and staff to choose whether or not to become or remain subscribed to a forum. We recommend that Question and Answer forums are set up for students to ask questions about the course work or assessment processes. As the video explains, make the purpose of every discussion forum clear, including how students are expected to engage with it and how often staff will reply to posts (if at all). If you want to speak to students in ‘real time’, for example for virtual Office Hours, you might want to try Moodle’s instant messaging style tool, Chat.
• Quiz is the other popular tool for online engagement. A quiz is a useful way to test or evaluate students’ knowledge and to keep them motivated by letting them see areas for improvement. Marking can be automated on some question types (such as multiple choice). Staff can see a detailed breakdown of results, as well as statistics on how easy or discriminating each question is. It can be used for both formative and summative (credit bearing) assessment, such as in class tests or examinations, but the latter is usually done in a ‘live’ classroom, so for online learning summative quizzes are more normal.
• Use of external resources will already be a familiar custom for many academic colleagues, but bear in mind YouTube is blocked in several countries, including China. The video also mentions LinkedIn Learning, Box of Broadcasts (log in with your UCL details) and ReadingLists@UCL, all useful enhancements. UCL Mediacentral can be used to host your own videos which can then embedded as links in Moodle.

Moodle: beyond the basics

As always, we recommend you keep it simple and prioritise the essentials, but don’t be afraid to go beyond the basics if you can. Here are a few ideas. If you want to dive a little deeper, the UCL’s ABC method of learning design can help plan how to move learning activities online in a more structured way. You may want also explore beyond Moodle, to Reflect, UCL’s blogging service based on WordPress.

Moodle Resources

• Book displays collections of web pages in a sequential, easy-to-navigate and printable format. They are especially useful when you have a lot of web content but don’t want it to clutter the front page of your course. Pages can contain links, images, embedded YouTube videos, etc and feature a Table of Contents.
• Lessons can be used to build structured pathways through learning materials and test knowledge as students make progress. Students usually make choices on each page area, sending send them to another specific page in the manner of a decision tree.

Moodle Activities

• Glossary provides a course-specific list of terms and definitions. Entries can be linked to words that appear within Moodle, so the definition pops-up when someone hovers their mouse over instances of the word. A tutor may stipulate definitions or ask students to contribute.
• Database enables tutors to set up form fields that students can then complete to contribute entries to the database. The fields may consist of images, files, URLs, numbers, plain text etc.
• Hot Question is used to create a hotlist of popular questions or topics from a group. Could be used to seed a discussion forum or a Collaborate session.

Where can I see more?

1. Colleagues at UCL Institute of Education (IOE) Learning Technologies Unit have put together a Moodle course Moodle Activity Examples – LTU (login required) showing you the tools above in use, together with several others.
2. They are also in the process of  developing Moving online a very useful resource containing step-by-step workflows on how to move sessions online, with links to further support sources.
3. The Miniguides site is the place to go to for detailed ideas and information on these and other Moodle tools. Support on other tools is available from the ISD Digital Education webpages.

A new Futurelearn MOOC is starting on Monday 23 March designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The three-week course will explore practical ways to teach and support your students online.

Members of the UCL Digital Education team will be participating on this course and we hope the MOOC will stimulate ‘next step’ ideas for supporting our students..

To supplement the Futurelearn forums we have set up a UCL-specific Teams channel. Teams will be a place to discuss the ideas of the course from a UCL context and add a practical localisation to the UCL toolset. We hope you can join us.

To join the Futurelern MOOC, go to https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teach-online/

To join in the UCL Teams discussion go to How To Teach Online (FutureLearn MOOC) – UCL community

ABC is the effective approach to curriculum (re)design, developed at UCL four years ago and now used widely not only at UCL but across the HE sector. Well over a thousand colleagues have now had a chance to participate in an ABC workshop. For those still unfamiliar with this ‘sprint’ approach, programme and module teams take part in an engaging hands-on ‘design sprint’ workshop, usually facilitated by UCL Digital Education. In just 90 minutes using a game format, teams collaborate to create a visual ‘storyboard’ outlining the type and sequence of blended and online activities required to meet the module’s learning outcomes. Assessment, cross-programme themes and institutional policies such as the Connected Curriculum can all be integrated according to the needs of the programme/module.

After running pilots in the 2014-15 academic year, ABC was launched as a service in 15-16 and has enjoyed steady growth in numbers of modules (re)designed per annum. As part of UCL’s 2016-21 Educational Strategy we committed to work with 250 modules by 2021. We have nearly reached this already, not counting workshops run by UCL academic colleagues.

Word of ABC soon spread beyond UCL especially as we provide workshop materials for free download. In 2016-18 we were funded by HEFCE Catalyst to both evaluate the ABC method and develop these materials onto a downloadable ABC Toolkit to help other institutions run their own workshops. We ran demos at several JISC Connect More events, ALT-C and international conferences and as a result ABC is now a familiar UCL ‘brand’ in the UK and beyond.

90% of ABC participants surveyed in the HEFCE project agreed their experience was positive and 71% that the workshop enabled them to enhance the curriculum. Many follow-up interviewees commented on the ‘buzz’ in the room and enjoyment of the workshops:

it’s just a fun workshop so it’s colourful, it’s paper based, you’re moving things around and you’re feeling things, people are excited, if there are tutors and there are many of those who actually have a fear of technology type things, well they don’t have to worry about it in a workshop like this, …  it’s alive, you can see it; people are talking and it’s great to see that….

In parallel we have run the workshops for 16 fellow-members of the League of European Research Universities, including at Edinburgh, Oxford, Imperial, Trinity College Dublin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and the Sorbonne. This networking led to the current Erasmus + project ‘ABCtoVLE’ (2018-2020) investigating both how institutions localise ABC and link it to their online learning environments. This year the UCL Digital Education team have also run workshops by invitation in Warsaw, Zurich, Geneva, Reykjavik and even as far afield as Auckland and Sydney.

The global interest in UCL’s learning design method is wonderful but hard to keep up with, so next year we will focus more on building a sustainable network.

UCL Digital Education has been awarded two year Erasmus+ funding to develop their well-known ABC learning design workshop with a 12 European universities. Since its inception at UCL only three years ago this unique ‘rapid-development’ approach to help academics develop high tech student-focused modules and programmes has had an unprecedented impact on the sector. Dr Clive Young, the originator of ABC alongside his Digital Education colleague Nataša Perović, gives the reasons for its success, “Most universities have aspirational strategies to develop future-looking digitally rich and blended courses, but few teachers have the skills, knowledge and time to redesign their programmes”. ABC is UCL’s response, a light touch team-based approach which co-creates a visual storyboard for a module in just 90 minutes. Over 75 workshops have been run at UCL with nearly 500 academics (and students) redesigning around 200 modules. The participant response has been overwhelmingly positive and ABC was soon picked up beyond UCL, and is now used at 20 other universities in the UK alone. The Erasmus project builds a strategic partnership between UCL, six other universities from the League of European Universities (Amsterdam, Helsinki, Leuven, Milan and the Sorbonne, with Oxford as an associate) and six innovative universities from Belgium, Denmark, Croatia, Estonia, Ireland and Romania. The partnership will develop ABC as a downloadable toolkit that can be used globally by any institution in the sector.  More information…

Follow the project progress via twitter @ABCtoVLE @ABC_LD.