The Effects of the Flipped Classroom and Online Education

A flipped classroom lets students take a video lecture before class and work on practice problems during class, which literally "flips" the traditional teaching style's timing. This study estimates the impact of the flipped classroom on the learning outcomes of college students in an introductory economics course using a randomized controlled design. Additionally, we examine the effects of online learning using the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment. By combining these two treatments, we find that the flipped classroom has a negative impact on students’ learning outcomes under the in-person classroom format but a positive impact under the online classroom format. While there are significant effects of the flipped classroom and online learning on students’ class engagement, such mediators have little association with students’ learning outcomes. This suggests that the direct effects of the treatments dominate the mediation effects