Physiology teaching at the University of Cambridge has historically involved whole-cohort lectures, supplemented by weekly, small-group teaching sessions called ‘supervisions’. Supervisions typically include 2-4 students led by an academic specialist, who asks questions and sets problems to solve. ‘Flipped-classroom’ teaching (FCT) similarly involves prior preparation of course material, followed by students working on tasks set by the instructor within the class itself. Active learning of this nature, requiring students to think through problems, ought to be particularly beneficial in physiology, a subject in which the underlying concepts can be challenging, and the implications of dysfunction complex and profound. Indeed, FCT has previously been used in physiology teaching at other universities, leading to improved exam performance, but with mixed results in terms of student satisfaction (e.g. Street et al., 2015; Entezari and Javdan, 2016; Rae and O’Malley, 2017). Because Cambridge students regularly receive opportunities for active learning in a small-group context, we wanted to establish whether they would perceive FCT as redundant. We introduced FCT to three undergraduate lecture series in digestive physiology. A three-lecture pilot course given to 187 first-year biologists in 2018 was followed by six-lecture courses to 386 first-year medical and veterinary students, and to 39 second-year biologists, the following academic year. Students were given material to prepare in advance. In the live presentations, they were given group tasks including multiple-choice questions, calculations, compare and contrast, and working out the clinical implications of certain conditions. Student feelings about the new style of teaching were assessed through questionnaires. In order to avoid leading the participants in their answers, they were asked more general questions about learning and understanding, backed up with the opportunity for open comments. The overlap between flipped-classroom teaching and supervisions was explored in detail through interviews. Feedback on the ‘flipped’ courses was very positive, the mean scores for all three cohorts showing that students generally believed that they had learned more, understood more and felt better-prepared for the exams, in comparison with traditional lecturing. The main complaint related to a perceived increase in preparation time, as Rae & O’Malley (2017) had also found. Strikingly, only 13 of the 265 completed questionnaires even mentioned supervisions, many of these referring to the continued need for small-group support. While students recognised the parallels between the two teaching methods when prompted in the interviews, they explained that the intensive nature of small-group teaching felt very different to working anonymously within a large lecture theatre. Despite the similarities in the active learning exercises that might be set in small-group and FCT sessions, we conclude that they represent very different experiences for the students involved. There is no evidence to suggest that our students found any redundancy between these types of teaching. As a result, we adapted flipped-classroom physiology teaching to an online format for this academic year, and it seems likely to be rolled out more widely in this university in the future.