Tag Archives: flipped

Flipping your class

andragogy, Teaching, ,

When considering whether to flip your class, consider this: No one says you have to flip every single lecture. In fact, it’s probably easier inside your department politically if you just flip a couple of lessons.

Can you think of a few homework activities, that through the semesters, your students have always found especially challenging? Maybe those lessons should be the ones you flip. That way they can complete the assignments within a group in the classroom and with you and/or your TAs right there to help out.

There are some other advantages to only flipping a few classes as well. Throwing in a few flipped classes now and again will keep things fresher for the students. Having change-ups like this is more likely to create situations where the students are successfully learning in your class. Remember, humans learn when active, alert and practicing… not by sitting behind a desk and falling asleep.

Using TED-Ed to re-envision massively online or flipped courses

MOOCs, , , , , , , , , , ,

Dr. Margaret Schedel had wanted to flip her classroom before the whole MOOC concept starting sweeping SBU, so it seemed like a plan to try not only flipping her class, not only by recording the standard lectures and using class time to work on the hands-on parts of computational arts, but also by making those lectures open to a wider audience using Coursera. This allowed for a massive group of students to synchronously go through the class with her own face to face students.  Grading is accomplished through simple computer grading assessments and through peer assessments of larger projects. A large amount of student interaction is accomplished via forums.

Changing things up a bit, we thought we would now try to take those same videos and put them through the “create a lesson” process of TED-Ed. These lessons go up into the wild as asynchronous content – though a class can still assign them to be completed according to whatever schedule is chosen. The world still has access.  They have computer graded assessments built in – that can bring you back to the video for a video hint if you get the answer wrong. It also has discussion forums, to interact with the instructor or other students. Here is the first lesson that we put together based on the week 10 set of videos:

Screen Shot 2014-04-01 at 11.04.09 AM

An instructor can create lessons like these, using any youtube video. This is really powerful.