UC San Diego

Much research has been conducted on the ways in which the hybrid-flexible (HyFlex) and flipped classroom models have impacted college students. However, less is known about how students interact with a course that combines the two models, especially regarding the modality through which they attend lectures. We observed the first flipped HyFlex offering of a particular computer science (CS) course at a large public research-intensive university in the United States. We found that the modality through which students initially planned to attend the course's lectures was impacted by their class standing and, to a lesser extent, their gender; however, a student's race was not found to impact their attendance plans. Secondly, we found that remote attendance had a higher rate of decrease than in-person attendance, while asynchronous attendance was the only modality to rise in the second half of the course. Upon investigating the reason for this difference, we found that the convenience of being able to access lecture recordings asynchronously was the factor that had the most impact on students' decisions to attend lectures and that their unrestricted access to course materials and asynchronous lecture recordings caused some students to perceive synchronous lecture attendance to be less necessary.