Saturday, December 19, 2020

Flipping Your Remote Classroom

I wrote just a few days ago about my effort in continuing my flipped classroom when we went into the remote mode (as opposed to being in an online class mode which is totally run asynchronously). I then ran across this article out of UC-Berkeley about doing the exact same thing.

It definitely seems consistent that for a flipped classroom, there should be a synchronous part, otherwise it doesn't make any sense. And it is nice to see the different variations of a remote flipped classroom, which gives me more ideas on how I can further tweak my own classes.

Do you run a remote flipped classroom? How do you do it?

Zz.

3 comments:

Tez said...

I started running a flipped classroom long before it was even remotely on the radar of my department. After a couple of years of experimenting (and still being constrained by very old style architecture, poor IT infrastructure etc) it got to the point where my teaching evaluations were great, the department noticed, and we set up formal processes to help others do it. (A big disappointment to me personally was that student performance on the final exam did not really improve, at least in my course. But everyone, including me, had more fun and at least they *thought* they had understood things better!)

This year I didn't have to teach, and frankly possibly doing a flipped zoom classroom next year scares me. Functionally I can see how some parts of it will formally work. But there is something about co-location where you can easily scan across multiple groups of students working on something and see the ones having issues, and duck in and out of what people are doing and then spot a misconception so you briefly grab the whole classes attention to clear it up and so on that I just can't see working that well.




ZapperZ said...

Did you also perform any type of concept assessment on the students beyond just the exams? Something along the line of FCI or FMCE?

In my case, there is a light uptick in the assessment when compared to the traditional lectures, but then again, I can't completely attribute that to the flipped format because some of the "quick check" questions that I gave in class were rather similar to the a few of the questions that appeared in those two assessment tests.

For the remote version of the flipped classroom, I truly believe that it helps the students especially if you are doing one or more synchronous session each week. It is rather tedious to follow a live, online lecture, because it isn't engaging enough, and the students may have a lot of distractions around them. So shortening the lecture presentation and focusing more on engaging activities (polls, breakout sessions, group problem solving, etc.) is more effective and engaging. This is exactly what a flipped classroom does.

I haven't done any concept inventory evaluations yet on my remote classes. I'm tempted to do that for this coming Spring, but I'm still debating.

Zz.

Tez said...

Doing the concept assessment is a good idea. One advantage of online I hadn't thought of - that isn't possible f2f where I teach just due to architectural constraints - is the ability to mix around group sizes.