This week’s scenario was about an instructor who is excited about online learning and wants to get started with a course of her own:

“I am keen to design my own online or blended learning course … I think I must …try to illustrate in a visual way what a good online or blended learning design could look like. I wonder which activity, module or course I should choose? “

My first thought was “Oh, my sweet summer child,” something Old Nan from the Game of Thrones books says to the Stark children. Meaning, you have not known the terrible winter yet. Online learning can do indeed amazing things. It can also be awful if not designed well. And when starting on the path, as in all innovations, there is always a curve of pain. No matter how much we follow the design principles and do our best, it takes some time to “get” online learning well.

Our group came up with lots of great thoughts and ideas about online course design, centered around the community of inquiry framework. My contribution was much more focused, related to a specific subtype of blended learning called flipped learning.

“Flipping” a classroom sounds quite logical: let’s put the repetitive content online and let’s do active learning in person. However, there is a difference between “flipped” classroom and “flipped” learning, per the Flipped Learning Network, a respected community of practice. They define flipped learning as a pedagogical approach where “direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.”

The website is chock full of information, tools, research, and all kinds of ways to learn about FLIP. In this blog posting, however, I would like to share briefly my own experience flipping a general biology course. My colleague and I started with backward design- what did we want students to be able to do at the end of each topic?- and scaffolded the material accordingly. Lectures were recorded in palatable (less than 15 minutes) chunks. Low stakes quizzes were assigned to the recordings to make students watch them. In the classroom, we had short lectures to address particularly challenging topics, and designed a variety of hands-on, inquiry-based activities. Our classrooms became noisy (because students were asking questions and discussing with each other) and dynamic. They chose a research topic of their interest, but had to discuss it with their peers. Liberated from the tyranny of long lectures, the instructors were able to interact more with the students, and go deeper into the material. Online discussions helped interactions between students. And…seems like students learned more also. This study was recently published.

Although the flipped classroom method has been in use for more than 15 years, it still has no unified theoretical framework or methodology (Bishop & Verleger, 2013; Zuber, 2016), and it continues to present widely varied implementations across educational settings and academic disciplines (Bishop & Verleger, 2013; Estes et al., 2014; Lage et al., 2000; Uzunboylu & Karagozlu, 2015; Zuber, 2016). So, I am not surprised that there are still lots of questions around what “flipping” means.

So going back to the original scenario…I would not start fully online. I would start with a flipped section (not the whole course). In fact, no need to record lectures right away- there is plenty of good quality material already available that just needs to be curated. And I would always have surveys and some kind of assessment to compare how students are doing. It is an iterative process, and it will take a few times to make it work right.

References

Barral, A.M., Ardi, V., Simmons, R.E. 2018. Accelerated Introductory Biology Course is Significantly Enhanced by a Flipped Learning Environment. CBE Life Sciences Education, 17(3) https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-07-0129

Bishop, J., & Verleger, M. A. (2013). The Flipped Classroom : A Survey of the Research. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (p. 23.1200.1-23.1200.18). https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2013.6684807

Estes. M. D., Ingram, R.,
& Liu, J. C. (2014). A review of flipped classroom research, practice, and
technologies. International HETL Review, 4(7).

Flipped Learning Network. (2014). What Is Flipped Learning ? The Four Pillars of F-L-I-P. Flipped Learning Network, 501(c), 2.

Lage, M. M. J., Platt, G. G. J., & Treglia, M. (2000). Inverting the Classroom: A Gateway to Creating an Inclusive Learning Environment. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220480009596759

Uzunboylu, H., & Karagozlu, D. (2015). Flipped classroom: A review of recent literature. World Journal on Educational Technology, 7(2), 142. https://doi.org/10.18844/wjet.v7i2.46

Zuber, W. J. (2016). The
flipped classroom, a review of the literature. Industrial and Commercial
Training, 48(2), 97–103. https://doi.org/10.1108/ICT-05-2015-0039