Redesigning University Large Scale Lectures: How To Activate The Learner

Universities are facing major challenges with increasing numbers of students and the requirement of cost savings. They intend to maintain international state-of-the-art research while providing future employees a high-quality education. In order to achieve these often conflicting goals of researching and teaching, innovative learning approaches need to be developed. We therefore propose a design of a flipped classroom for large-scale lectures that adopts a learner-centred approach and enables higher levels of interaction and learning outcomes. We therefore derive requirements from the theory of interaction and address them with design principles for large-scale flipped classrooms, which we implement in a large-scale information systems lecture. Our approach divides the teaching-learning process into a cycle of four successive phases: IT-supported phases for the acquisition and reflection of knowledge, as well as presence phases for the application and discussion of the acquired knowledge. We evaluated the concept by conduct-ing structured interviews with lecture participants. We contribute to theory by deriving insights on how interaction and peer recognition account for the success of the flipped classroom approach. As a practical contribution, our paper gives advice on how large-scale lectures can be redesigned in order to meet future challenges of management education.