Opinion

Viewpoints: The Flipped Classroom

By Eleni Becker

February 17, 2025

The Flipped Classroom: Professors Do Not Need AI to Replace Them, They Do It All By Themselves

In 2019, a virus called SARS-CoV-2 emerged and took over the world. 

Many countries considered ‘developed’ had to admit extreme shortcomings when it came to digitalization. In a matter of weeks, all kinds of institutions had to shut down. Remote working and learning became a major component of many people’s lives. While Covid-19 continues to exist, most enforced quarantining has ended. Many people have been vaccinated and the fear of contracting the virus seems to have vanished altogether. We are hastily returning to a ‘normal,’ pandemic-free life and continue to re-establish our economies, secure our jobs, and get our private lives back on track. However, there is one domain that will likely never return to pre-Covid standards. Despite its importance, the educational system has been kicked down by Covid, and professors continue to do their best to keep it there.

Covid-19 affected every aspect of our daily lives for several years. Face masks became more than frequent. We moved from basic DIY cloth masks to surgical masks and, eventually, special FFP2 masks in a desperate attempt to protect ourselves from getting infected. Food items, hygiene articles, etc. were constantly sold out, and nobody knew how the pandemic would turn out. With the changes in our society, the educational system had to adjust as well. Almost every school and university had to abandon in-person learning and switch to an online approach. In universities specifically, professors resorted to recording their lectures beforehand and providing them online. Since many countries had not yet achieved a sufficient level of digitalization to allow for fully remote learning, this seemed to be the best solution at the time.

Many schools opened their doors again in and around 2022; however, in-person learning has been left behind with the pandemic. The pandemic gave us a perfect opportunity to update our digital learning opportunities, and we did nothing with it. Instead, professors have resorted to recycling the lectures they had recorded during the height of the pandemic, and, to this day, upload those recordings for students to watch outside of the scheduled class time. At times, the videos consist of random snippets of different recordings that will be cut together to fit the semester’s course content. However, adjusting the video content to the respective semester is a luxury. I cannot recall how often I have watched lecture videos that discussed course contents from past semesters or even different course sections.

You might be wondering what happens during the scheduled in-person class periods if the lectures are expected to be watched and memorized outside of class time. If you did not guess, during the actual face-to-face class, professors will shamelessly sit the class down and have them work on group exercises, while they watch the students and maybe walk around to answer questions. Some students have professors who will not even give feedback on the group work, some do not provide keys to the worksheets, and others do not even seem to care what happens in the classroom as long as everyone is present since attendance is more ‘important for learning.’

This practice is called the ‘flipped classroom model,’ a new system of educating, when in reality, it is just a bad excuse for the educator’s laziness. Instead of using the pandemic as an opportunity to revolutionize our educational system, our educators have decided to take a step backward and provide us with bad voiceovers on low-quality screen recordings from three years ago. We could have started integrating interactive online exercises into courses. We could have established group spaces that allow for remote peer-to-peer interaction in group exercises. We also could have established more interactive in-class technologies that promote participation. However, that would have required a little more work as an investment.

In Germany, there is a saying, ‘Wenn du jemandem den kleinen Finger bietest, will er gleich die ganze Hand!’ which roughly translates to ‘If you offer someone your pinky finger, they will ask for your entire hand.’ In our educational system, the little finger was the opportunity for digitalization, and what educators took from us was quality in-person education as well as the hope for actual digitalization. And they took this from us in turn for immediate work relief for themselves only, because students certainly have more to do if they have to watch a lecture before class and then attend a dead classroom.

Recording lectures and providing them online is a wonderful addition for students who cannot attend the in-person classrooms. It makes education possible for many people who would have no access to schooling or are dependent on homeschooling. But, dear educators, please don’t use the ‘flipped classroom’ to decrease your workload. You are making it seem as if you cannot wait to be replaced by AI. We are not far from generating lectures using AI, and they will be much better than your screen recordings. Educators are invaluable, please do not just throw that away. We students should not advertise for a ‘flipped classroom’ because it allows us to watch the lecture from bed. Let’s all remember how much we are paying for this ‘flipped classroom’ education scam.