Can we "flip" non-major programming courses yet?

Abstract

Proponents of "flipped" instruction offer a vision of class meetings devoted to active learning, in exchange for students spending time outside of class acquiring basic knowledge from readings or video lectures. The price paid for this vision is the need to create the readings or videos. However, such materials are becoming available as open educational resources, and if they become widely enough available it may be possible to flip classes without requiring each instructor to develop his or her own materials. In the spring of 2014 I flipped an introductory programming course for non-computing majors in an effort to see if freely available video lectures could support it. This paper reports my findings, notably that open resources can support such a course, but just barely.