Peruse this! Use of an educational social platform for a Global Entrepreneurship flipped class

Abstract

[EN] The COVID-19 pandemic made all of our universities to move to a full-online teaching scheme this March. Online teaching presents different drawbacks compared to classroom teaching, but probably the main one is the difficulty to keep the interactivity with the students throughout the online sessions. This is why a flipped classroom scheme becomes even more relevant in the new normal.A key aspect for a flipped class is that the information transfer, traditionally performed through lectures, is moved out of the classroom to different types of pre-class assignments. Students are expected to fulfill those assignments before the class allowing the instructor to engage in more interactive activities with the students in the classroom. Nevertheless, getting students to read the proposed contents before the class is a very important problem in higher education. In this work, we show the results of the implementation of pre-class reading assignments in a Global Entrepreneurship course through an educational social platform that allows students to discuss the reading online with their classmates: PERUSALL. We use the platform to understand how students are reading and understanding the different materials, their reading behaviors and how the instructor can take advantage of all that information. Considering the type of group (50 students, 65% of them international students from exchange programmes we have also performed a survey to assess the platform and evaluate the perception of the students of their learning process.