to flip or not to flip: the theory and practice of blended learning
TRANSCRIPT
To flip or not to flip: the theory and practice
of blended learning
Sarah Honeychurch
Craig Brown
Niall Barr
Learning Technology Unit
@NomadWarMachine
Overview
• Quiz and results
• Some motivations and strategies
• Examples from practitioners
• Lecture capture tools
• Classroom response systems
• Group discussion
• Feedback and discussion
Quiz questions
1. Where did the talk take place and when?2. How many videos did Khan Academy have in 2011?3. How many students per month?4. What was Khan’s previous job?5. Where did he live (City)?6. Who was he tutoring?7. What interesting feedback did they give him about his YouTube
videos?8. What reasons did they give for this?
All questions from: Salman Khan’s TED talk Let's use video to reinvent education: http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education
Quiz answers
1 Where did the talk take place and when? Long Beach, California.
March 2011
2 How many videos did Khan Academy have in
2011?
2,200
3 How many students per month? About 1 million
4 What was Khan’s previous job? Hedge fund manager
5 Where did he live (City)? Boston
6 Who was he tutoring? His cousins
7 What interesting feedback did they give him
about his YouTube videos?
They preferred them to
live Khan
8 What reasons did they give for this? They could go at their
own pace
Flipped Classroom
• …a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and
homework elements of a course are reversed.
• “Flipped learning is not about how to use videos in your
lessons. It's about how to best use your in-class time with
students.” (Sams and Bergmann 2013)
• Get them to watch a pre-recorded “lecture” at home, thus
freeing up class time for targeted instruction.
• “Although the technology component has gotten a lot of
buzz, the pedagogy underlying flipped learning is nothing
new. For centuries, teachers have asked students to come
to class prepared by reading a section of text.” (Sams and
Bergmann 2013)
Motivations and strategies
• Active learning:
“students are no more attentive in lectures than while
watching television.” (Lancaster & Read 2013)
• Large class sizes
• Just in Time Teaching
• Peer Instruction
• Lecture recording
• VLE forums
• OERs
Just in Time Teaching (JiTT)
“a teaching and learning strategy based on the
interaction between web-based study assignments and
an active learner classroom. Students respond
electronically to carefully constructed web-based
assignments which are due shortly before class, and the
instructor reads the student submissions "just-in-time" to
adjust the classroom lesson to suit the students' needs.”
Mazur: Peer Instruction
• First question: How to teach, not what. (Design before
content).
• Instruction is easier than assimilation: Teacher as
information transfer – teacher as facilitator of information
assimilation. (2007, 2009)
• Lecture: “the transfer of the lecturer‟s notes to the
students‟ notes without passing through the minds of
either”.
• If lecture notes are available beforehand, how to make
use of the „spare‟ time?
If a heavy truck and a small car collide, which exerts more
force:
a) The truck
b) The car
c) They are both the same
d) There is no force
“Professor Mazur, how should I answer these questions?
According to what you taught us, or by the way I think about
these things?”Images from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/American_truck.JPG;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/KIF_0001_reg.JPG
Mazur: Conventional & Conceptual Qs
Mazur: Conventional & Conceptual Qs
• Newton‟s third law: For every action there is an equal
and opposite re-action.
• Obvious?“…all students can recite Newton‟s third law and most of them can
apply it in numerical problems. A little probing, however, quickly
shows that many students do not understand the law. Halloun and
Hestenes provide many examples in which students are asked to
compare the forces exerted by different objects on one another.
When asked, for instance, to compare the forces in a collision
between a heavy truck and a light car, many students firmly believe
the heavy truck exerts a larger force.” Mazur (2007)
• Conventional v conceptual questions
(“plug and chug” v ConcepTests)
• “the sage on the stage” v “the guide on the side”
Mazur: Peer Instruction
• Pre class reading
• In class: go into depth “semi-socratically” (question, not give answers)
• ConcepTest:
• Question
• 1.5 mins silence
• Answer with “clickers”
• Turn to neighbour and justify response
• Revised answer with “clickers”
• Lecturer gives explanation (at ~53.54 in video)
• Students who have the right answer convince others better than Prof
Mazur could.
• The better you know something, the harder it is to teach (you forget
the conceptual difficulties of new learners)
• Active engagement
• Better understanding → better problem solving
• Good problem solving =/= indicate understanding
Mazur: Results
Mazur (2007)
Lecture recordings
• Surprise fact: some students prefer recording/video links
of lectures.
• Salman Kahn‟s cousins
• Could go at own pace, rewind, fast forward,
repeat as necessary
• University of Glasgow Psychology/ English students
(Draper 2014)
• Less crowded, could sit with friends, can see
slides better, easier to ask GTA questions
afterwards.
Jim Baxter: Online Forums
• Level 1 Psychology: 560 students
• Replace lecture time with group work and forums. 50%
of lectures replaced with online tasks. Staff time re-
directed to support online tasks.
• Monitor and give feedback on random selection each
week
• Use GTAs to help monitor and moderate
• Exam failure rate reduced from 13% to 5%. Course
failure rate reduced from 12.1% to 2.8%.
OER Resources
Ted Talks: http://www.ted.com/talks/browse
Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/
MIT OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
iTunes University: http://www.apple.com/ca/apps/itunes-u/
OpenLearn: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/
Jorum: http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
(and many, many more)
Available tools
• Lecture capture
• Classroom response
Considerations
• “Not all classrooms lend themselves to flipping. Courses
that are more Socratic or inquiry-based, or those that
don't have reams of factual content for students to learn,
aren't particularly suited to flipping.” Sams and Bergmann
(2013) Well …
• Scalability: easy to broadcast to a large class, not so
easy to run this? Peer interaction vital.
• What if they don‟t do their homework?
If students are going to skip homework, it‟s far better
to miss watching a video than to miss doing the
problem sets. Khan (2012)
Group Discussion
• Will you use this in your teaching?
• How? When? With which classes?
• Why/when would you not use it?
• Do you agree that not all subjects are amenable to
flipping?
• What are the barriers to you using it?
References
Bergmann, J. & Sams, A” (2013) “Flip Your Students' Learning”
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar13/vol70/num06/Flip-Your-Students'-
Learning.aspx
Draper, S. (2014) Engaging large classes http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/talks/mfisch.ppt.pdf
Educause (2012) Things you should know about …flipped classrooms
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli7081.pdf
Flipped Classroom Network - A website devoted to flipped learning. http://flippedclassroom.org/
Just in Time Teaching: http://jittdl.physics.iupui.edu/jitt/
Khan. S. (2012) The One World Schoolhouse http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-
One-World-Schoolhouse-Salman-Khan2.pdf
Khan,S. (2011) Let's use video to reinvent education
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
Lancaster, S. and Read, D. (2013) “Flipping lectures and inverting classrooms” in Education and
Chemistry http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2013september/flipped-classroom-inverting-
lectures.asp
Mazur, E. (2009). Confessions of a converted lecturer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI
Mazur, E (2007) Confessions of a converted lecturer
http://hans.math.upenn.edu/~pemantle/active-papers/Mazurpubs_605.pdf
Mazur, E. (1997) Peer Instruction: A User's Manual (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ)
REAP Case study (Jim Baxter): http://www.reap.ac.uk/reap/assessment/pilotsSUPsy.html
To flip or not to flip: the theory and practice
of blended learning
Sarah Honeychurch
Craig Brown
Niall Barr
Learning Technology Unit
@NomadWarMachine