Engaging students with self-directed development of academic skills through a flipped classroom approach

The generic skills of critical analysis, academic writing and referencing are essential for successful student progression in Higher Education. Extra-curricular programmes of academic skills seminars can offer limited opportunity to evaluate the extent to which students have understood and are able to apply the key concepts to their academic work.
To provide a more student-focused active learning environment a ‘flipped-classroom’ approach was introduced for ‘Introduction to Referencing’ seminars. Two short screencasts with follow up questions were used as pre-seminar preparatory resources to deliver the essential principles of referencing. The seminar time was then utilised for a series of student-centred activities. These were developed to evaluate students understanding of the essential aspects of referencing, foster student engagement with the learning process and promote peer-support.
Despite limited engagement of some students with the pre-sessional materials, all students attending the seminars actively participated in the activities provided. These generated a greater degree of discussion and there was evidence of deeper learning with students applying generic concepts to specific contexts of their academic work.
Overall, observations form the seminars and the positive reactions of the students suggests that the ‘flipped classroom’ provides the opportunity for more effective student- focused support and development of independent learning strategies.