An introduction to flipped classroom

Many of the first instructors on Ublend are actively using flipped classroom methodologies with great success. This blog post explores what it is and how to use it.

As the name indicates, flipped classroom teaching is a method that takes the lecture-followed-by-homework way of teaching and flips it on its head. In flipped classroom teaching, students watch the lectures at home before the class, so class time can be spent working through unresolved questions with the instructor and fellow classmates. The aim of flipped classroom teaching is to maximize the time spent on interactive communication between the students and their instructor.

Here are some of the benefits of flipped classroom:

• By increasing the time spent in interactive communication, both students and instructors get to fully engage in meaningful and productive discussions. As Salman Khan mentions in his TED Talk about the future of education, the technique ‘humanizes’ the learning experience. Rather than a passive process where students sit in silence, it is an active process where students take part in games, quizzes and other interactive activities organised by the instructor.
• If you film yourself giving lectures before sending them to your students, you can polish, edit and re-record them, which means you give students the best version of yourself.
• Students get to review lectures at home at their own pace, allowing them to pause, repeat or fast-forward. This is particularly helpful for students who need more time to wrap their head around a concept. Data shows that by using flipped classroom, students’ grades were indeed higher but more importantly, the bottom third of students’ grades increased 3 times more than the whole class’s increase.

• Students get to learn in a more comfortable, personal setting where they don’t have to be embarrassed if they don’t grasp a concept the first time it is explained.
• Students are provided with front-row seats at their lectures which is particularly helpful for classes of several hundred students, where following a lecture from the furthest rows is challenging.
• It is inexpensive for schools to implement, especially since most students today have easy access to a computer/smartphone.
• Using a new teaching technique engages students in its own right, which means they are a lot more receptive to what you will tell them.

Get started with flipped classroom tomorrow:

Send your students a video link to an online-lecture that covers the basic material of your next lecture. The following day, class time can be spent discussing the main ideas put forward in the lecture, clarifying any confusions and answering unresolved questions.

“What if I can’t find an online-lecture that covers the material?”

In terms of content, you have two options:

1. Find an online video that is made by someone else, but suits your needs. If you can’t find a video, start looking for lectures in other formats, such as audio files, web pages or notes written for a similar lecture topic..
2. Film yourself with your phone/computer giving your lecture. Make sure you have enough memory available! Alternatively, if your lecture is mainly slide-based, you can use a screen-capture software and a microphone to give the full lecture. Students will only see your computer screen and hear your voice on their screens. We recommend using a good screen recording software such as Camtasia Recorder and a good “rough paper” software like SmoothDraw 4.

“What if students don’t go over the material by themselves as they are expected?”

This is indeed a risk, although the same risk exists in normal lectures. However, by using flipped classroom, you make sure that students get acquainted with the methods to solve a problem, not only the theory behind it, which sometimes doesn’t speak to students as much as practice.

Become a flipped classroom pro

If you decide to take flipped classroom more seriously, here are a few tips we learned from a talking with flipped classroom champion Graeme Pate (winner of the University Teaching Excellence Award 2015–16, University of Glasgow SRC Most Innovative Teacher Award 2015 and College of Social Science Teacher Excellence Award 2015–16):

• Think hard about attention spans. Make sure your videos are not too long (usually less than 10 minutes will do) and include short break-out sessions where you ask a question, link to a quiz or encourage reflection. You can also encourage your students to watch the video material in groups and discuss it together to make sure they get through it.

• Film in HD from the beginning. We recommend using Echo360, a professional software designed for lecture capture.
• Make your lectures future-proof. For example, don’t point your students to specific pages of their textbook. 5 years from now, the textbook won’t be the same and your video will be irrelevant.
• Don’t be too radical in imposing flipped classroom on your students. First, try it out in one class and then collect feedback from students. From then, try it out in a few more classes and transition to it gradually. Although flipped classroom is a proven technique, it is important to remember that its effectiveness depends on what subject you are teaching and what kind of students you are teaching it to.

The quality of the content provided for students to study at home is very important, but what’s most important are the activities during your classes. By letting students work at home on the lecture material, you have freed a lot of class-time which you can now spend on interactive activities. Initially, you can simply discuss the materials they reviewed at home and maybe go through exercises together to introduce them to the relevant techniques. However, with more preparation you can:

• Set up games designed to make them use the course material in a new way.
• Set up hands-on workshops, such as building a robot, or making a video tutorial.
• Prepare visits to places relevant to your course; a geology class might now have time to visit a mountain and study its rocks, a history class can now go to a historic battle site…

Flipped classroom teaching is about making instructors the best versions of themselves, about improving the learning experience but also pushing the limits of education by forcing oneself as an educator to be creative and invent new ways to teach.