Flipped Classroom Experiment in an Integrated Preparatory Class
The purpose of this article is to present our feedback about a flipped classroom model that we used with first-year students in the preparatory classes for the Polytech Marseille engineering school starting in 2012, and also later, starting in 2017, with the integrated preparatory classes at the Aix-Marseille campus of the ESAIP engineering school. Frankly, all the program changes that have happened in recent years, along with students’ bad study habits, do not make the transition to first-year university very easy. That’s why, after studying various works on flipped classrooms and educational innovation, we created our own flipped classroom model. This article will show how the flipped classroom can offer an interesting alternative to our current education system. For our classroom model, we incorporated the absence of traditional lectures and marking of exercises with an increase in the number of assessments and the use of digital tools. The results have been encouraging: we have been able to increase the difficulty of in-class exercises along with students’ success rates, while also introducing team work. This experiment will enable us to show how the flipped classroom model can be a good fit with the current system.