Flippin’ education: a new pedagogy for paramedic students?

The modern era of technology has opened up a raft of opportunities to innovate teaching and introduce new ways of teaching and learning that could increase engagement, increase students' abilities to critically think and to autonomously learn. The focus of this article will be the piloting of a flipped classroom on a paramedic science degree, and the extent to which the flipped classroom may be valuable in paramedic education. The article will highlight the specific issues that the flipped classroom was designed to address, the design of the teaching method including the advantages and disadvantages, and evaluation of the teaching.

More traditional methods of teaching teach the basics of a concept during classroom time and the student is expected to learn more deeply about the concept in self-directed study time. The basis of flipped classroom is that students learn the basics of a concept in their own time before attending class. Therefore, class time is used to explore a concept more deeply, ideally in a seminar facilitated by the lecturer (Abevsekera and Dawson, 2015). In this case the author used a 15-minute podcast as the learning that students needed to do before attending class. The podcast was produced by the author, therefore it was tailored specifically for the needs of the students. However, it would be acceptable to use a podcast that is already available on the internet. In addition, there was a crib sheet produced that had links to websites and further reading should the student wish to access the same information in a written format, or read further into the subject before class. The flipped classroom as a concept is one that the author felt has a large potential in the paramedic curriculum and so it was piloted for a session on a cohort of level 5 paramedic students.