Exploring Students Perceptions and Performance in Flipped Classroom Designed with Adaptive Learning Techniques: A Study in Distributed Systems Courses

In Computer Science, teaching Distributed Systems presents many challenges primarily related to the students prior knowledge. Some new Learning Approaches emerged and can aid to improve learning processes in this scenario, such as Flipped Classroom and Adaptive Learning. In this context, this paper presents a study of the integration of the Flipped Classroom method with Adaptive Learning techniques for assisting Distributed Systems courses. Quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out with 63 students from 2 higher education institutions during Blockchain classes to evaluate students acceptance. We also implemented a quasi-experimental study to evaluate the learning impact of out-of-class material with and without Adaptive Learning techniques. Students had a significant improvement in the test score in both approaches (without significant differences between them). Also, the use of Adaptive Learning techniques increased the student acceptance of the Flipped Classroom method in our study.