A thematic overview of reviews on flipped classroom research and practices: challenges and recommendations

The flipped classroom, also known as the reverse classroom, is a student-centered teaching approach where students explore learning materials outside classroom hours at their own pace and utilize in-class time to engage and interact with the concepts they have learnt with guidance from their instructor. In the past decade, numerous studies have been conducted on the flipped classroom due to surging interest from both researchers and educators worldwide. This has led to a number of reviews being performed on individual studies in an attempt to compare and summarise the findings. However, these reviews often cover varying aspects of the flipped classroom and this can cause information overload for researchers and practitioners alike. Hence, this paper sets out to conduct an overview of reviews on flipped classroom research focusing specifically on the challenges and the recommendations. Five reviews on flipped classroom research were selected after a rigorous search was performed using various databases and analysed using content analysis. This overview identified and classified the main challenges and recommendations according to four categories namely instructors, students, resources and learning outcomes. It is hoped that this thematic review would serve as a useful reference for educators and researchers alike to reflect on the current scenario of flipped learning and to make further advancements in flipped classroom research