Tag Archives: Flipped Classrooms

andragogy, Teaching

Flipping your class

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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.

MOOCs

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

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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.

 

SBCapture

Snow Days – Personal Capture time!

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Are you over the snow?  It’s been a white winter, that’s for sure!

More importantly are you teaching a course where you really need all of those pesky lecture hours? Do you know what online courses do when it snows really bad?  They keep going.  We have the technology so that you can keep going to!  I’m going to share a trick with you that will let you “flip” those snow days. (Flipping is when you listen to the lecture at home, and do active learning/group work/homework in the classroom.)

Do you have a SBCapture account?  Yes?  Go here: https://echoserver.sinc.stonybrook.edu 

Now go to the Downloads tab, and grab personal capture for the OS that you prefer. (Your choices are Win and OSX – don’t go getting all RaspPi on me!)

This software allows you to capture the video from your screen, audio from your mic and optionally, the video from a webcam.  This way you can sit in front of your computer and give your lecture.  There are simple edit capabilities, you can pause the recording in the middle and directly load the finished product straight into Blackboard.

Unless you are already using SBCapture for room based capture this semester, you will need to drop me a line so that I can make the appropriate hooks on the backend between SBCapture and Blackboard, but that is simple enough.  Same goes for if you don’t already have an SBCapture account – just let me know, and I’ll set everything up.

FORM to request Personal Capture

Here is an example of what an end result looks like using Personal Capture:

Sample of Personal Capture

(In this case the webcam was setup to the side… yours might be a tight shot of your face.)

I hope that you find this, and find it helpful!