Why don't flip your classroom to make more time for class activities?

Flipping the classroom is a new term for a well established educational process. The idea is to make time within face to face teaching to focus on developing the higher order skills of analysis and synthesis, as opposed to using this face to face teaching to deliver the lower order skills of knowledge and information. This division is acheived by providing the knowledge before the session in the form of videos and/or interactive tutorials, and enabling the face to face time to be focussed on active learning techniques and class discussion.

Given technology developments this is becoming much easier to achieve at UCS. The following describes why and how I flipped my classroom for a lecture and assessment I delivered on a Communication and Study Skills Module in School of Science, Technology and Health.

The learning design involved a formative assessment which was peer assessed. As identified by Race (2006) the expectation was the peer assessment process would facilitate the student practicing constructive criticism, learning from each other, engaging with the marking criteria and promoting deeper learning through evaluation.

My challenge was to deliver a significant amount of content which is time consuming while managing a class activity on peer assessment. To be effective this activity is time consuming as the students need to engage with the marking criteria. Therefore, to make time for the students to discuss the marking criteria and set up group marking exercises in class I needed to move the knowledge and information component outside the face to face session. In other words, flip my classroom.

A key requirement was to ensure there was a sense of continuation from the video (pre-session) to the face to face lecture

A few tricks I used included:

1. make the video production simple. I used a talk over powerpoint


2. in the video I included a task which they need to complete before the lecture


3. in the video I concluded with an overview of “what we’ll cover in the lecture”.


4. I used the announcement tool on Blackboard to communicate the video is available


5. in the lecture I spent some time to answering the task set in the video


6. in the lecture explicitly refer to the video to encourage them to re-visit the video after the session

What did I find?

The creation of the video (talk over powerpoint) was very simple. I uploaded it to the module area on LearnUCS. There was a need to communicate effectively with students to ensure they understand the need to watch the video before coming to the session. I was glad to see many of them had.

The resources are available below and illustrate how I tried to connect the learning activities

• Pre-session Video >>> http://youtu.be/gweZBrf7pd8


• Lecture Presentation >>> https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12497737/ELTT%20Slides/Technology_4_Learning_Lecture_Slides.pptx

Reference

Race, P. (2006) The lecturer’s toolkit: A practical guide to assessment, learning and teaching