Flipped learning: An effective pedagogy with an Achilles’ heel

Flipped learning is seen as offering a more effective means of engaging students and contributing to desirable student outcomes. However, research into the efficacy of flipped learning returns mixed results. Emerging from interviews with 19 students, we find that flipped learning has both positive and negative attributes often experienced by the same student. Our research highlights that flipped learning strategies need to be purposefully conceptualised and understood as either influencing learning or facilitating learning; that the facilitating strategies are critical to satisfaction in a flipped learning environment; and the influencing strategies most likely to be resisted. Flipped learning’s fundamental assumption, that students can and will do the preparatory learning required, may be its Achilles’ heel.