At the University of Pretoria, the focus of a third year Entrepreneurship is on starting up businesses, self-employment and creating employment. While the curriculum is set and allows little foray, lecturers strive to improve the quality of teaching and learning, making the best use of the available infrastructure, class-time and technology. There is a lively debate on the merits of teaching traditional lecture-based classes versus using technology for teaching, and how they can be improved, blended, hybridised or flipped. In the developed world with ubiquitous access to technology and internet, flipped classroom teaching has become synonymous with blended learning and very much the norm. While video lectures are not new, the affordances of videos, screencasts, audio lectures and the like can add real value to a flipped classroom. It is in this arena that a third-year course in entrepreneurship was flipped in 2015, and reported in this article. The study investigates both the instruction method as well as the application of theory through tutorials and focuses on how to apply theory to practice in a representative way in an attempt to simulate a real business experience. Therefore, this study explores the use of teacher created videos that students could watch in their own time at home or on campus and the purpose of the study was to investigate student perceptions of the benefits of using videos and tutorials to link theory to practice. Data were sourced from anonymous written feedback provided by students at the end of the semester. In two questionnaires, students had to rate different characteristics of videos and tutorials using a simple 3-point scale. Those responses were numerically weighted, with 0 for Not important, 1 for To some extent Important, and 2 for Very Important, the weights added and the characteristics sorted accordingly. The questionnaire also contained open-ended questions where students could reflect on how the tutorials or videos helped them. Written feedback was captured electronically and thematically analysed using computer-based qualitative analysis software, ATLAS.ti~(™). The same code set was used in analysis of both questionnaires so that themes could be compared between the two. These findings would ascertain how the course components in the flipped classroom contributed to integrate theory and practice. To ensure transparency and validity in the process, coding was checked by two seasoned academics, resulting in minor re-naming of categories. The findings report the benefits that students perceived they gained from taking part in a flipped class approach, as captured in their reflections and the research questionnaire. The qualitative findings were interpreted using the guidelines of Sams and Bergmann (2013), Ash (2012) and Tucker (2012) to understand perceived benefits in an entrepreneurship classroom. Rating the characteristics of the videos, showed in decreasing order: Having another resource in addition to the textbook (53); View it again to understand better (51); Use for revision (50); View again for deeper insight (48). It showed that videos were highly rated as an additional resource. Almost equally important was the ability to view them more than once whether to understand better, for revision or gaining deeper insight. Many students reported viewing slides more than once, and opening the slides at the same time as watching the video on that topic, which was confirmed from logs in the CMS. Before a student can bridge from theory to practice, a solid understanding and knowledge of theory is needed. Videos can therefore be regarded as very successful tools to support mastery of theory. Understanding and learning the theory, particularly within students' preferred learning style, all point toward student initiated activity, representing by far the most salient theme in the qualitative analysis. Considering that lecturing is regarded as passive and lecturer-centred, and videos as lectures that have just switched delivery mode, the students in this study reported the value of different independent learning activities taking place in response to watching the videos, suggesting that the videos used in this course were more student-centred than lectures. A seasoned lecturer knows what the difficult concepts are, anticipates the misunderstandings and from experience uses illustrative examples and applications in an organised well-planned, and -executed video. The tutorials were the opportunities where the application of theory in the real world had most value and two-way bridges between theory and practice were built, with understanding improving further. This confirms the superior teaching value of the flipped classroom, particularly when complicated theory has to be understood and applied in practice, which clearly will not happen to any great extent in a classroom lecture. Not only did the flipped classroom provide opportunities to identify knowledge gaps but also allowed for some lecturer-student interaction, peer-interaction and collaborative learning.
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