Getting Started with Flipped Learning
Why consider a flipped approach for a course?
- It’s an excellent way to emphasize active learning, a research-based approach to teaching.
- It can help us approach teaching more flexibly. For instance, a plan for what students might do besides listening to lectures could also help in a move online.
- While videos aren’t the heart of the flipped approach, already having such items would be useful in a move online.
Start with one lesson in one course
The first time through, think small
Find some buddies
This could be a team from your discipline doing similar work or just someone whose judgment you trust. Decide on how you’ll share files, too.
Get oriented to the flipped approach
The heart of the matter is spending time with students as they do the more cognitively demanding tasks like solving problems, analyzing texts, or applying theories. Making this happen also involves students’ independent preparation.
- Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty by Robert Talbert
- Talbert’s Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty, chap. 4
- Lucretia Fraga, “Eight Myths About the Flipped Classroom”
Generate and organize your learning outcomes
Talbert’s advice here is amazingly useful, so don’t let the term “objective” turn you away
- Talbert’s Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty, pp. 103-117
- “Establishing Powerful Learning Outcomes:
- Resource: “Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Action Verbs”
- Resource: “Learning Objectives Planning,” a one-page document to record your responses to a three-part exercise that runs through chapter 5 in Talbert
Plan what will happen during the group space
Especially if you lecture a lot, decide what students could do instead during the precious face-to-face time. First plan how you’ll help students address more cognitively complex objectives and then think back to the way students will prepare
- Talbert, Chapter 5 pp. 117 –124 and Chapter 6, pp. 125-134 (Don’t miss the “Quadrant of Underpreparation” on p. 132.)
- “Active Learning” (a meaty article with underlying research, lots of strategies, and a good bibliography)
Decide what students should learn independently
Create ways to share content and add activities that guide students in engaging effectively with it. Students can use all these options asynchronously
- Some options: videos you create or find online, narrated PowerPoints, reading guides for academic articles or textbook material
- Talbert, Chapter 6, pp.134 to 146
- Tutorial: *Using Stream to Create a Video”; start at 24 minutes
- Resources for Working with PowerPoint: a video on adding narration, a pdf on saving a PowerPoint in OneDrive, and pdf on sharing a link to a OneDrive file
How will you know learning happened?
There’s room for traditional graded activities and informal, ungraded assessments. Consider:
- Consider a simple quiz, a short writing task, or a few polling questions
- “Classroom Assessment Techniques”
- “Formative and Summative Assessments,”
- Tutorial: “Creating and Deploying Tests in Blackboard”
- UIW has licenses for Poll Everywhere and Zoom (which has a polling function). There are also free tools like Socrative and Kahoot.
- James Lang, “How Peer Instruction and Polling Have Changed by Teaching”
Check for accessibility
UIW has lots of new tools, many from Microsoft, for making material accessible to learners with diverse needs.
- View Sheryl Burgstahler’s 18 minute video, “20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course”—or look at a print version if you prefer.
- “Improve Accessibility with the Accessibility Checker” (Just 1 minute!)
- Read: “Creating Accessible Documents in Microsoft Word”
- “Inclusive Classroom: An Interactive Guide to the Immersive Reader” (The Immersive Reader supports English Language Learners or those with reading challenges—an instructor only needs to alert students to the tool
- Tutorial: Adding real-time captions or subtitles in PowerPoint