This project will review the opportunity for a new decision-making process, barriers to and challenges, changes needed, and provide a practical approach toward reform for evaluating educational platforms that support flipped classrooms and workshops.

Selecting an educational platform to meet the needs of schools, students, and educators is complex and challenging. Many times, educators lean towards options that are familiar to them, easy to use, and low in cost. In other situations, high-level administrators make district-wide decisions, preventing the flexibility of individual circumstances and needs. Society in 2017 has become accustomed to learning about new educational tools and trying to make alternations to the current set-up, assuming that new technology will ‘enhance’ and ‘improve’ the traditional classroom or workshop.

Many of the current “solutions” available and advertised to educators all claim to be the one solution that will do it all.  Unfortunately, once you get into the day-to-day grind of instruction many teachers find out that most platforms are lacking in some area.  This project’s goal is to help educators choose a platform that will best suit their needs from content delivery to communicating with students and everything in between.  After all the most valuable resource teachers have is time!

The steps taken in this project are as follows:

• Identify the problem: What will the decision-making process look like for educators trying to select an educational platform that supports flipped classrooms?
• Identify and describe example flipped classroom models
• Identify potentially what this evaluative process could look like
• Identify the barriers educators may encounter during this process
• Identify and describe what changes need to be made to combat any factors that may get in the way of this process
• Identify and describe a practical approach toward selecting the best educational platform