According to Minnesota Daily (the U of M paper), flipped classrooms are gaining traction at the University and professors have even started looking at MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with five professors teaching MOOCs this summer.
“There has really been a dramatic uptick on the part of faculty that is almost a renaissance of thinking about how to teach better, and how to use new tools, that is more aggressive than it was before,” said chemistry professor Chris Cramer, who served as the faculty liaison for the University’s Office of eLearning and taught a flipped course last year.
In flipped classrooms, professors record and post lectures online for students to view outside of class. During normal class time, students generally participate in group work, hands-on activities and class discussions.
The flipped classrooms are in line with goals that Karen Hanson, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, laid out in February for the University’s eLearning initiatives, which include redesigning programs to integrate online components into courses.
It sounds as if the reaction from students has been mixed.
Jessica Wyatt, a chemistry freshman, said it’s unrealistic for professors to expect students to learn from videos at home.
“Flipped classrooms at the [University] are really obnoxious,” she said, “because you don’t get the lecture-style learning that you’re looking forward to when you go to college.”
On the other side of the spectrum, graduate student Kelsey Brown said a flipped classroom format would be attractive to her.
“[Flipped classes] would give students a lot more time to ask questions and already get familiar with the material so they can delve deeper into the [subject],” she said.
I found the comment on lecture-style learning to be surprising. At the eLearning conference I attended last week, someone noted that while MOOCs provided the world with access to the content that what would keep college is business was the relationship with fellow students and professors. But I don’t know that the relationship is developed around lectures. I think that another part of the equation is preparing students for online and other alternative teaching methods. One of the teachers in the article noted…
“I think once students start to get used to the idea of maybe learning a little bit differently … they enjoy the flipped classroom,” she said. “But I don’t know if a lot of the freshmen I teach are prepared for that.”
What would be nice would be a mix of flipped, MOOC, traditional (lecture and discussion), experiential classrooms to suit all learning styles. It’s exciting to see steps towards customized education.
I think for certain types of courses flipped classrooms can be extremely beneficial. For example, listening to a lecture on Climate Change and then having a discussion about it afterwards in the actual class time could be really great.
I have also seen this as a method for teaching math. Which I think is brilliant. The idea is that the students watch the assigned lecture/lectures (often times they are broken down into 10 minute segments so that you can do a problem in between the topics) before coming to class. Then when they get to class, instead of sitting through a lecture, the students work through problems with either the instructor or in groups, or both.
The only problem is that this then ruins the “BIG” classes the universities often teach courses in. You can’t exactly have group work in a class of 600 students. But I think that would be a good thing.
Essentially I think they are brilliant for certain kinds of classes and topics. However, some topics are best presented in person in lecture. Some of my fisheries classes were invaluable in person because we were all asking questions during the lecture, while other lectures in the course easily could have been presented online.
Also with professors more often than not, posting their PowerPoint’s/lecture materials online, many students feel that they don’t need to attend all of the lectures because they can just go through them in their own time on their own pace and actually learn something. Therefore, the aspect online lectures might be the answer to students skipping class. Also it holds the student more accountable for their own learning which I think is important.
Here’s a great podcast on this subject:
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/22/155224654/building-a-better-classroom
Particularly listen to the second part of the podcast with Salman Khan, it focuses on “flipping” the classroom.
Submitted by: Breanna Walker – Former University of Minnesota-Conservation Biology Major on St. Paul Campus, Transferred to University of Washington-Seattle Senior in Aquatics and Fisheries with Marine Mammal emphasis, Southern Resident Killer Whale Researcher
Breanna,
Thanks for the comment. I am a huge TED fan so I’ve heard the podcast – or rather had heard the pieces. Nice to see them juxtaposed.
I think you bring up a great point – flipped classrooms work in some classes and for some subjects.
My husband is an English teacher at a local Community College. He is not a fan of online classes at least not for Literature classes. I hadn’t thought of it before – but I think the reason is that the model for Literature classes has always been flipped. You read the material at home and the class time is spent in discussion!
Ann