Empowering HCI Students to Better Manage their Learning Process through a Flipped Classroom Experience

This position paper presents observations from a flipped classroom experience of teaching an HCI bachelor course at the University of Trento (Italy) in Fall 2015. Students were provided with conventional lectures, digital learning materials in Moodle, and a collaborative prototyping platform for supporting project work over the 2-months course duration. Overall, students highly appreciated the flexibility of having access to a combination of digital and conventional teaching resources. However, we observed a rather slow adoption of the remote collaboration features offered by the prototyping platform during the project work. This shows students’ initial reluctance and lack of familiarity with using asynchronous communication-collaboration tools for better managing their group work and learning in blended education programs.