Effects of online strategies on students’ learning performance, self-efficacy, self-regulation and critical thinking in university online courses

Fostering students’ abilities to deal with practical problems is an important objective of professional training. To enable students to have more practicing time under the supervision of trainers in class, flipped learning has been adopted to shift the lecture time to the before-class stage, and hence more time is available for in-class practicing. Although flipped learning has been recognized by scholars as an effective teaching mode, researchers have also indicated the challenges of implementing it; in particular, many students have difficulty learning before the class on their own. In this research, a self-regulated flipped learning approach was proposed to cope with this problem by guiding students to set their learning goals, and supporting them in monitoring their learning status in five stages, namely, goal setting, flipped learning (including pre-class video-based instruction and in-class discussion), task sharing, self-evaluation, and self-regulation feedback. In addition, an experiment was conducted in a professional training program to examine the effectiveness of the proposed approach. From the experimental results, it was found that the approach significantly improved the students’ learning achievement, self-efficacy, self-regulation, and critical thinking, which could be a good reference for future research related to flipped professional training.