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The Flipped Classroom: a response
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Our Virtual PAC member, Scott Rose, commented on The Flipped Classroom:
"Thanks for bringing this to our attention. There is a whole lot of interest in this approach at the post-secondary level, at least in the US. Part of the thinking is that since a lecture is largely a one-way communication-- particularly in this era of auditorium-sized classrooms-- you lose little and gain much by delivering recorded lectures prepared by the very best lecturers and preserving the local instructor resources for 1:1 interactions. Institutions like Stanford and MIT are putting Computer Science lectures by their best people up for free. Not sure how much spread there has been to other disciplines."
Categories: Currently... (thoughts from the Chairs)
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2 Comments
Can you see something like that happening at Point Grey? Not just in giving students access to pre-packaged lectures made by outside resource providers like Content Connections, but where our own teachers' lectures or lab demonstrations might be recorded for ongoing reference?
We've taken lots of advantage of MIT and Princeton's free lectures at our house. Noah made extensive use of MIT's Open Course program while an elementary home learner. The rest of us just use them to learn cool stuff. And of course, I recommend Khan Academy all the time to kids who are looking for extra support in math, or want to move ahead. It's free and excellent (though I think they need to make it easier for people to figure out exactly which video they need to view). There are a lot of resources available to students whether they are in a neighbourhood school or learning independently now. And there is free online tutoring through LearnNowBC if you can figure out how to register.
Some online secondary school courses already operate in this "flipped" way (EBUS's Math 10 to 12, for example), where students view the lecture (which may include practice questions which open to extra explanations if you get them wrong) and then do the work either with the teacher in an online class or on their own but with a lot of immediate feedback from the teacher. This is different from other online courses where links and reading material are provided (but no lectures), or there are recordings but students work their way through the material with little contact with the teacher (and sometimes only with access to a marker). Just because something is online or there's a lecture in a video format doesn't mean that it's "flipped." The flipped part, as the article describes it, is where the teacher uses the class time to work closely with the students who have already viewed the lectures.
I found it interesting that some teachers are just trying this on their own as an experiment. The inner city results were the most interesting to me. But in a way, watching lectures at home online is not all that different from being asked to read your textbook ahead of class like they used to do in the olden days. (That was a joke.) The key thing I took from the Globe's article is that technology alone doesn't make a difference, it's how you use it. Or leverage it, as our growth plan puts it here at Point Grey.
http://www.anglicanjournal.com/nc/news-update-items/other-news-it
ems/article/teaching-the-teachers-10157.html
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