Towards a flipped cyber classroom to facilitate active learning strategies

Success within the distance learning paradigm typically requires a strong intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner. This motivation needs to be matched with effective delivery of engaging course content. Developing an active engagement environment for deep learning is a nontrivial task as the instructor is not physically present. To address the concern in an online/blended delivery model, we had developed and examined our first cyber classroom, in which lectures are automatically recorded and posted to a website for subsequent online consumption. The observed limitations of this approach were twofold: (1) online student participation in onground classroom activities was unfeasible; and (2) onground student collaborative activities were severely curtailed by the classroom layout. In this work in progress we present our revised concept grounded in active learning scientific principles combined with lessons learned from our prior approach. By leveraging classroom spatial layout best practices combined with the apropos technology, we seek to address the aforementioned two concerns. Specifically we present a description of our revised cyber classroom, along with plans for future application involving integrating online learning with the flipped classroom concept.