www.slate.com: If you are in college, I don’t mean to alarm you—but you are probably being experimented on. Stop checking for both of your kidneys; it’s not that kind of experiment. But chances are, one or more of you courses is currently being administered upside down, or “flipped.” Everything is backward: The lecture is assigned as homework! The “homework” is completed in class! The sun revolves around the Earth, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
9 comments:
The flipped classroom is an interesting idea that I have had the chance to experience first hand, just not at CMU. I know CMU supports recording and broadcasting lectures, but I'm not sure how many professors utilize it. As the for the flipped classroom, I definitely agree that it is not for all types of class, many small discussion oriented classes are fine the way they are. Personally, the one class where we tried a flipped classroom, high school chem, was actually quite nice and helpful. Because I had the video saved, it was easy to refer to and rewatch certain parts and go to class and ask questions and work on the assignments. I will say it isn't for everyone, but even those who complained began to enjoy it after they had adjusted. But the success rate will vary greatly course to course and instructor to instructor.
This is kind of brilliant. Especially in a place like CMU, I see most people almost following this pattern naturally. I have had the rare opportunity in drama to attend a "real" college class, and what I noticed was that most people chose to read the book (and essentially the lecture material) at home instead of going to class, and then they would swarm office hours to get help with the homework. Since I am a firm believer in learning by doing, I saw that the teachers dismissed this as a case of when people don't come to lecture, they don't learn, and thus need all the help with the homework. But I suspected (and hey, experienced myself) that the problem was that no one was learning in lecture. The material was vital, but the part of learning where you retain and apply the information all came from homework. Essentially what I'm saying is that I was seeing students attempting to learn in the order the article suggests, instead of the prescribed method, and conforming the class to meet with that just makes sense.
This is a weird idea that a teacher in high school tried for a semester and I do not think it was too successful because many times if students were unable to follow the lecture online or if they were confused by the content the class time was spent basically reciting the lecture then we would not get to the homework and we were just left with more work piling up and slightly less confusion. I am currently taking a principles of economics class and I do appreciate the lecture then homework format as simple and traditional that may sound.
This is a really interesting idea, and I think for some courses it sounds like it would have a lot of merit. I know personally that when I took math classes in high school, I had a hard time learning from the lecture and felt that it was a lot more helpful to me as a student if I met with my teacher outside of class and worked on problems one-on-one or in small groups. But I also think for some classes, like the article mentions, this would not be an effective method. But that doesn't mean it isn't valuable to try out. Its been pretty widely agreed that our system of education needs work and the only way to improve it is to try new things. Honestly, the whole idea of "lecturing" may need to be pushed out as much as possible. For literature classes for example, which the articles suggest this would not be effective for, it could still be better to limit lecturing and instead have more discussion based classes.
I think that flipped classrooms are a great idea for math and science classes. I have a lot of friends who are majoring in those fields and they often feel like their class time would be of more use to them if it were more hands on. From what I understand they get a lot out of office hours and recitation where there are going over problems in a more interactive way, but because lecture is so one sided they get less out of it. I also think it could work for some humanities courses as well if it served to make class time more discussion and synthesis based as opposed to just lectures.
I had an AP class in high school that was my school's "case study" on flip teaching. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't fantastic either. Although I'm sure the concept can definitely work, the way it played out in my situation was not that great. What ultimately happened is that there wasn't enough time to complete the problem sets in class, so you had to continue spending significant time on them outside of class. So I ended up watching a lecture and working on homework at home, which seems to rather defeat the concept.
My Trig/Pre-Calc teacher did this for part of the semester my senior year of high school. I was not a big fan of it.The teacher posted videos of her doing math problems while she spoke over them to teach us, and then we asked questions in class and did problems out of the textbook and she could walk around and make sure we were doing it right. This didn't make much sense to me because I feel that homework is an opportunity to practice what you learned in class, not just busy work that your teacher looks over after a lecture you watched online.
This is an interesting idea and although its not as much of one that i have experienced in college, several of my high school classes operated in a similar way. Although I see some promise, I do see problems with this approach. First and foremost, often when i listen to a lecture I am thinking of questions that are directly applicable to what I am hearing at the moment. Often if these questions go unanswered, it harms my understanding of the topic. Also, I cant imagine how big lecture classes would be able to give students the personalized attention they need during the class.
I really like this idea. Im always shocked when i hear one of my friends talk about how they don't understand their homework or the course material and were unable to talk to professor about it because you cant ask questions in lecture. Office hours a thing but thats not helpful and a lot of people have class during those times. I think making class time be about questions and homework be about just getting the material really works for STEM courses. If you cant ask questions during lecture anyway what exactly is the harm in making lecture portable.
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