High-Efficiency Inverted Instruction: Doubling Capacity while Preserving Small Classroom Quality

The inverted or "flipped" classroom model of teaching is growing in popularity and used in both K-12 classrooms and higher institutes of learning across many disciplines.Published benefits of this model include higher student engagement, increased peer learning, lowered student frustration, and the ability of the instructor to provide immediate, direct feedback to students.However, this model requires a substantial investment of time from the instructor to properly prepare and distribute material that would have been covered in a traditional lecture.At the same time, there is substantial pressure on universities to lower tuition costs and use more efficient models of teaching such as MOOCs.In this paper we discuss a model for flipping classrooms that quickly amortizes the initial instructor investment and addresses the university need to reduce costs.At Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, we converted one of our highly impacted core programming courses, CPE 357 Systems Programming, to an inverted style of instruction that greatly increased instructional throughput without significantly increasing instructional costs.Under our high-efficiency model, we can minimally double the sections covered by a single instructor, with student support, while preserving the same quality of education received in our traditional, small-classroom method.In our paper, we fully describe our inverted model, share our experiences with it, and provide initial data supporting our claims.