7 Things You Should Know About Flipped Classrooms - Educause
0 likes1,276 views
1. A flipped classroom reverses the traditional lecture and homework elements, having students watch short video lectures at home and devote class time to exercises, projects, and discussions. This allows class time to focus on active learning. 2. In a common flipped classroom model, students watch video lectures outside of class and complete quizzes. In class, instructors lead discussions and help students apply what they learned through hands-on activities and problem solving. 3. Several colleges and universities have implemented flipped classroom techniques in courses like video production, accounting, physics, and more. This allows more flexible learning and moves instruction to an active, collaborative model.
7 Things You Should Know About Flipped Classrooms - Educause
- 1. THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT…™ FLIPPED CLASSROOMS 1. What is it? The flipped classroom is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Scenario Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the For the past two weeks, Kyle has been taking a flipped class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, course in designing food gardens. Before he attends each or discussions. The video lecture is often seen as the key ingredient class, he watches videos of short lectures recorded or in the flipped approach, such lectures being either created by the recommended by his instructor. Each lecture comes with a instructor and posted online or selected from an online repository. brief online quiz that offers him immediate feedback on While a prerecorded lecture could certainly be a podcast or other whether he missed any essential points. Today as he enters audio format, the ease with which video can be accessed and class, he glances at the schedule on the whiteboard. For the viewed today has made it so ubiquitous that the flipped model has first half hour, teams will discuss how the content of the come to be identified with it. video lectures on microclimates, insect predation, and disease control will inform their team projects. Professor The notion of a flipped classroom draws on such concepts as active Dalton circulates among the tables to see if anyone has learning, student engagement, hybrid course design, and course questions. podcasting. The value of a flipped class is in the repurposing of class time into a workshop where students can inquire about Kyle’s team will be repurposing an area the size of an urban lecture content, test their skills in applying knowledge, and interact backyard into a visually appealing garden that is also a with one another in hands-on activities. During class sessions, functional food source. It’s part of the larger class project to instructors function as coaches or advisors, encouraging students reclaim a strip of city land by building a demonstration food in individual inquiry and collaborative effort. garden. “I think we should bring in disease-resistant blueberries, grapes, and pome fruits,” says Coleen, looking 2. How does it work? at the rough drawings they have made so far. Dalton stops There is no single model for the flipped classroom—the term to look over their design. “Check the nursery catalogs on the is widely used to describe almost any class structure that provides front table,” he suggests. “Disease-resistant strains are prerecorded lectures followed by in-class exercises. In one clearly marked in their listings.” As they search the catalog common model, students might view multiple lectures of five to and discuss which diseases might be a problem in dwarf seven minutes each. Online quizzes or activities can be interspersed apples, pears, blueberries, and grapes, Kyle enters their to test what students have learned. Immediate quiz feedback and cultivar choices in their Google Docs space. They are turning the ability to rerun lecture segments may help clarify points of to a discussion of microclimates and plant placement when confusion. Instructors might lead in-class discussions or turn the a chime signals discussion is over. classroom into a studio where students create, collaborate, and put into practice what they learned from the lectures they view outside In the second half of the class, team monitors each retrieve class. As on-site experts, instructors suggest various approaches, two flat boxes from the front of the class. One box contains clarify content, and monitor progress. They might organize a stack of pins and various leaves preserved in plastic. The students into an ad hoc workgroup to solve a problem that several second box has a foam insert topped by a paper grid; each are struggling to understand. Because this approach represents a square is labeled with a nutritional deficiency or a disease comprehensive change in the class dynamic, some instructors have common to food plants. During the next half hour, each team chosen to implement only a few elements of the flipped model or is to identify the disease or nutritional deficiency and pin the to flip only a few selected class sessions during a term. correct leaf in the right spot on the grid. Dalton is on hand, directing attention to clues and sometimes challenging their 3. Who’s doing it? choices. A growing number of higher education individual faculty have begun using the flipped model in their courses. At Algonquin As he leaves, Kyle reflects that the hands-on activities have College, a video production class has been using this model to given him a far better grasp of the information and more explain the workings of editing software, a procedure that is confidence in what he has learned than he could have gotten notoriously difficult to explain in a standard lecture. Short tutorial from an in-class lecture. video lectures let students move at their own pace, rewind to review portions, and skip through sections they already understand, © 2012 EDUCAUSE This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ educause.edu/eli ™
- 2. THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT…™ FLIPPED CLASSROOMS meaning students come to class able to use the software and 6. Where is it going? prepared to do creative projects with their peers. A particularly As the flipped class becomes more popular, new tools may successful example of a blended and flipped class in accounting emerge to support the out-of-class portion of the curriculum. In at Penn State accommodates 1,300 students. In-class time is used particular, the ongoing development of powerful mobile devices for open discussion, a featured guest speaker, or hands-on will put a wider range of rich, educational resources into the hands problem solving where instructor support is supplemented by of students, at times and places that are most convenient for them. student assistants. At Harvard University, one physics professor Greater numbers of courses will likely employ elements of the not only employs the flipped model but has also developed a flipped classroom, supplementing traditional out-of-class work correlative site, Learning Catalytics, that provides instructors with with video presentations and supporting project-based and lab- free interactive software enabling students to discuss, apply, and style efforts during regular class times. At a certain level of get feedback from what they hear in lecture. adoption, colleges and universities may need to take a hard look at class spaces to ensure they support the kinds of active and 4. Why is it significant? collaborative work common in flipped classes. In a traditional lecture, students often try to capture what is being said at the instant the speaker says it. They cannot stop 7. What are the implications for teaching and to reflect upon what is being said, and they may miss significant learning? points because they are trying to transcribe the instructor’s words. The flipped classroom constitutes a role change for instructors, By contrast, the use of video and other prerecorded media puts who give up their front-of-the-class position in favor of a more lectures under the control of the students: they can watch, rewind, collaborative and cooperative contribution to the teaching process. and fast-forward as needed. This ability may be of particular value There is a concomitant change in the role of students, many of to students with accessibility concerns, especially where captions whom are used to being cast as passive participants in the are provided for those with hearing impairments. Lectures that education process, where instruction is served to them. The flipped can be viewed more than once may also help those for whom model puts more of the responsibility for learning on the English is not their first language. Devoting class time to shoulders of students while giving them greater impetus to application of concepts might give instructors a better experiment. Activities can be student-led, and communication opportunity to detect errors in thinking, particularly those that among students can become the determining dynamic of a session are widespread in a class. At the same time, collaborative projects devoted to learning through hands-on work. What the flip does can encourage social interaction among students, making it easier particularly well is to bring about a distinctive shift in priorities— for them to learn from one another and for those of varying skill from merely covering material to working toward mastery of it. levels to support their peers. 5. What are the downsides? The flipped classroom is an easy model to get wrong. Although the idea is straightforward, an effective flip requires careful preparation. Recording lectures requires effort and time on the part of faculty, and out-of-class and in-class elements must be carefully integrated for students to understand the model and be motivated to prepare for class. As a result, introducing a flip can mean additional work and may require new skills for the instructor, although this learning curve could be mitigated by entering the model slowly. Students, for their part, have been known to complain about the loss of face-to-face lectures, particularly if they feel the assigned video lectures are available to anyone online. Students with this perspective may not immediately appreciate the value of the hands-on portion of the model, wondering what their tuition brings them that they could not have gotten by surfing the web. Those who see themselves as attending class to hear lectures may EDUCAUSE 7 Things You Should Know About…™ feel it is safe to skip a class that focuses on activities and might miss the real value of the flip. Finally, even where students embrace EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit membership association created to support those the model, their equipment and access might not always support who lead, manage, and use information technology to benefit higher education. A comprehensive range of resources and activities are available to all EDUCAUSE rapid delivery of video. members. For more information about EDUCAUSE, including membership, please contact us at info@educause.edu or visit educause.edu. February 2012