Flipped — does it mean what you think it means?

If I hear one more educator tell me they have ‘flipped’ their classroom by uploading their lecture recordings, I might just scream.

In a ‘flipped’ classroom, the timing of lectures and homework-type activities is reversed. The lectures are recorded (ideally in short video format) for students to view in their own time, and the related activities take place in the class time instead of at home.

Some points to note:

• If you used to deliver an hour-long lecture and expected students to do an hour of associated work at home, ‘flipping’ this around will still entail you providing an hour of class time to them. Providing lecture recordings as a way of reducing face-to-face teaching hours is not ‘flipping’ anything.
• If your students don’t currently do their homework, ‘flipping’ the homework and lecture activities may just mean that they now don’t listen to lectures. If your lectures currently have little meaningful connection to student learning and assessment, they will continue to ‘check out’ of that activity — in fact, providing it as an underproduced, mostly-audio, hour long experience, buried in a folder on your LMS makes it even easier to ignore.

The flipped classroom is not for everyone, and there are a range of other ways to achieve a learning environment that blends digital and physical resources.

Let’s stop the overstating and reign in community misuse of the term ‘flipped’.