“Flipping the Class” in Higher Education

Lately, there has been a lot of interest in the topic of “flipping the classroom” in  the field of higher education, particularly due to the popularity and success of the Khan Academy (e.g., read CBS 60 Minutes – Khan Academy: The Future of Education). In addition, advances in technology, especially making video production more user-friendly and less expensive, allow instructors to quickly record narrated and annotated videos (i.e. screencast) which

can then be shared with students through various video-streaming websites. According to proponents, “flipped classrooms” engage students with content more deeply, provide opportunities to personalize learning, and can result in overall higher learning outcomes.

What is “flipping the class”?

The Flipped Classroom Infographic
- click on image

Compared to traditional classrooms, where an instructor exposes students to new content during class time while students then apply the newly-learned material in their homework, so-called “flipped classrooms” rotate this sequence. Here, the instructor prepares short lectures of the to-be-learned material, often in the form of online videos, and makes them available to students before class. Then during class, students complete activities or projects that require them to apply the material from the lectures. The idea behind this method is that more of the actual class time is spent on higher order thinking (Bloom’s Taxonomy: Application, Analysis, etc.) while more basic tasks (Bloom’s Taxonomy: Recognition, Understanding) are completed independently before class.

What is the advantage?

Posting a brief online lecture in video format offers several advantages. First, the video is available 24/7 allowing students to review material at a convenient time and location (e.g., local coffee shop). Furthermore, students can stop the video anytime, replay important parts, or watch the complete video multiple times. This is especially useful when using the “mastery learning” approach where students can only move to the next activities if he or she has mastered the previous step(s).

With students exploring new content outside of class, the actual class time can now be used to further engage students with the material applying higher-order thinking skills. Depending on topics and subjects, students can now conduct experiments, solve complex math problems, or work on projects with the instructor being present and providing guidance. In addition, class time can also be used for students to work on activities that match individual interests or academic needs; thus, offering the possibility to provide more personalized learning.

Wait, aren’t we doing this already?

Taking a close look at the concepts behind and the principles of a “flipped class”, one might wonder whether the idea is really that new or whether it has been around and is just becoming popular. At least since the turn of the century, faculty and instructors in higher education have been exploring blended learning that combines traditional face-to-face classes with additional Internet-based activities or resources. Similarly, in online education, it is often necessary, if not unavoidable, for individual students to learn content on their own “outside the class” and then apply this content in another form (e.g., discussion forum, individual paper).

While the practice of incorporating Internet-based resources into education might not be new, the benefit of using those rests within the opportunity to gain valuable class time for other educational purposes. For example, by shifting some activities outside the regular class period, the actual class might be used for students to complete projects where they need to apply newly learned material and higher- order learning skills. Nevertheless to ensure student learning, any “flipping of classes” or use of Internet-based resources should be done in pedagogically sound ways. Too easily, one could fall back to the “sage on the stage” model where instead of having a person providing content by standing in front of the class, it is now done through online videos. Thus, it takes a delicate effort by the teacher/facilitator, even in a student-centered classroom, to guide students and make learning meaningful.

For more information developing successful “flipped classes”, see recommendations by Jon Bergmann, Jerry Overmyer and Brett Wilie.

 

Additional Resources

• Flipped Learning Network
• Blended Learning
• Khan Academy
• Ted Ed – Lessons Worth Sharing
• Flipping the College Classroom – Robert Talbert, Ph.D., Grand Valley State University

Key strategies on how to engage students in online discussion

It is often said that students who actively participate in the learning process tend to learn more than those who do not. This principle of involvement is applied both inside and outside the classroom, as well as in an online environment. In addition, active participation might enable critical thinking that possibly leads to higher achievement.

In many online courses, discussion forums are often used as one of the major means to support student learning. Online discussion differs from traditional classroom discussion in some ways. First of all, online discussion ensures that everyone has the opportunity to contribute by requiring every student to post their thoughts and comments on certain topic(s). Secondly, online asynchronous discussion also allows more time to give and internalize feedback with a greater depth of reflection. These benefits are emphasized in this following list of key strategies and tips that will encourage active student involvement.

1. Set clear guidelines: To successfully encourage students to reach an acceptable quality and quantity of participation, instructors should provide clear guidelines in detail. By having clear guidelines, students will be more aware of  expectations about when to post and  how much they should support their opinions with reference to readings, research, or other course materials. An additional benefit of having students follow clear expectations is that it can help students focus on specific goals and often produce more organized and high quality outputs. Posting the guidelines in the course syllabus or as an attachment to the opening message of the first online discussion would be one way to utilize this strategy.
2. Student-led discussion: While the presence of instructor is important to keep the discussion on track, one can foster autonomous student-led discussion by assigning student roles or focusing on topics relevant to their lives. For example, the instructor could introduce debatable topics intentionally and assign some students the role of devil’s advocate, hence encouraging critical thinking by examining opposing viewpoints through asking and answering questions. This also offers the opportunity for students to practice online netiquette by respecting each other’s opinions. Furthermore, students could be assigned the role of moderator thus allows meaningful and balanced peer participation. By doing so, students could develop facilitation, summarizing, and critical thinking skills.
3. Ask thought-provoking open-ended questions: Students tend to contribute more when they find the dialogue thoughtful and meaningful. With a variety of perspectives, students are more intrigued and interested in expanding their ideas. Students want to go somewhere based on the discussion and do not like to re-word what others already said. A common way to encourage participation is to have course material being applied to one’s own situation. Instructors should be clear about the rule that simply agreeing and disagreeing are insufficient without explaining a rationale.
4. Make discussion an important part of your class: Students often overlook the importance of online discussion. To better encourage student participation, include a rationale in the syllabus why discussion is important and, therefore, is worth so many points. Also, if instructors incorporate ideas and knowledge generated in discussion on exams, it reinforces the importance of student contribution and requires active participation to internalize the content. Offering an opportunity for students to synthesize, integrate, and apply what has been discussed is another option to make discussion a central ingredient of the course.
5. Form Small Groups or Teams: Learning groups have been shown to be effective in online discussion by encouraging student participation and critical engagement. To effectively form a small group, one suggestion is to ask students to write down the names of three or four students with whom they would most like to collaborate based on students’ preference, interests, or past experiences. Similar to the face-to-face setting, group learning provides the learner with peer-review and a responsibility to the group to keep up with discussion. Small groups allow having a more focused discussion that is especially helpful for large classes. Please read “Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams” from Barbara Davis at University of California at Berkeley for more information.
6. Create a supportive and caring environment: A supportive environment is another important feature of online discussion. Typed messages can be often misinterpreted and, one is less likely to participate when feeling uncomfortable. As we have seen, students like to feel safe in class discussion and this is perhaps one of the most challenging missions within online environment. Since students report they need honest, open, and respectful environment, it is important for the instructor to set this atmosphere from the beginning. To foster a supportive environment, instructors could launch the class with an individual introduction posting so that students better get to know each other. Providing a set of guidelines, such as family/friends background, personal experiences, or sharing a photograph could potentially draw something in common. Last but not least, encouraging your students to use a general open student forum to post and ask help from each other via student-to-student interaction tools such as discussions or chatting is also useful.

Utilizing online discussion is now very common, even in onsite courses as a supplementary tool. Fortunately, effective strategies for managing online teaching and learning are being designed and tested continuously by those in the field. For additional resources on designing and managing effective discussion forums, please see below. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at ic@indiana.edu

Additional resources

•  J.V. Boettcher, Ph.D. :“Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online Quick Guide for New Online faculty”
• Rebecca Owens: Eight Tips for Facilitating Effective Online Discussion Forums

Images from:

• http://www.ttacnews.vcu.edu/2009/09/student-led-conferences-help-students-become-more-self-determined.html
• http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/EnterpriseDetails.asp?a=420
• http://www.stayawake.tv/ViewBlog/Focus-groups-A–reminder-that-your-social-circle-is-very-very-small-23
• http://www.cispetro.com/index-3.html

Creating Accessible Online Courses

Emerging technologies make it possible for students with disabilities to take classes in the online environment. Thousands of students with some type of disability have successfully completed online programs in different fields. However, as an instructor, you can facilitate the process to access and assimilate instructional content to distance students with visual, hearing, or cognitive impairments. Here is a list of suggestions to make your content more accessible:

1)  Contact the Instructional Consulting Office or the Adaptive Technology centers in your department or University. They will provide you with helpful resources and will work with you on making your particular online class more accessible to students with disabilities. Generally, the sooner you involve these specialized centers in the process, the better. In this way you give them enough time to assist you on looking for effective instructional alternatives to deliver your class. They will also help you in making your instructional content more accessible such as closed captioning videos, creating accessible Word and PDF documents, printing Braille documents and tactile enhanced graphics, etc.

Here at Indiana University, you can contact the Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers for more information and for workshops related to making online content more accessible.

2)  Find out what features from your Course Management System are not too accessible and use viable alternatives. For instance, the features that are generally inaccessible to students using adaptive technology in Oncourse are:

a) Rich text or “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editors: Even though these editors facilitate formatting text to most students, they tend to cause a lot of difficulties to screen readers thus being  unusable by visually impaired students. An alternative to these editors is allowing your students to attach an external file so they don’t have to type their answer in the embedded rich text editor.

b) Forums: Navigating through the Oncourse forum messages can be very challenging to visually impaired students because the concept of a thread is mainly achieved by adding a visual indentation among messages, which cannot be detected by them. This makes it difficult to know who is responding to a specific message in the thread, especially when there are many students carrying out multiple discussions. in the forum.

3) Add structure to your class resources such as Word and PDF documents and PowerPoint presentations: In an unstructured document, screen reader applications would read the content from beginning to end, line by line. This means that visually impaired students would need to listen to the whole document to get to the “Results” section. By adding structure to the documents, students with disabilities can easily navigate within it. Here are a few recommendations to add more structure to your documents:

a) Use styles to create heading formats (Title, Heading 1, Heading 2, etc).

b) Add alternative text to all included  graphics

c) Do not use tabs and spaces to create a table, instead use the “Table” tool

d) Use bulleted lists to emphasize individual points and numbered lists for a series of steps in a sequence

e) If converted a Word document into PDF, use the accessible options provided by Adobe Acrobat
(http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/overview.html)

Additional resources:

• Oncourse Accessibility Hints for Course Creation IC Podcast
• Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers
• Converting Accessible Documents to PDF

Free alternatives to easily create online self-check quizzes

Self-check quizzes provide an effective and relatively easy way for learners to reaffirm and reflect upon their current knowledge level about a specific topic. Learners are also able to identify topics that they have already mastered and those in which they still have some deficiencies or misunderstandings. Moreover, self-check quizzes can promote learning by providing detailed feedback for each question wrongly answered and increase learners’ motivation as they can consider these quizzes as a challenge to overcome in order to continue with the rest of the lesson.

Even though they are not graded, the results of the self-check quizzes could be used by instructors as a form of classroom assessment technique. Provided that the questions are properly written, instructors can identify sections of the content in which learners struggle the most by focusing on those questions that are most often answered incorrectly.

Contrary to online survey tools (such as SurveyMonkey.com or Google Forms), online quizzes provide assessment and feedback features. As soon as the learner submits the quiz, she receives feedback letting her know how well she did in the quiz, the right and wrong answers and even in depth feedback per question.

Oncourse comes with a convenient and flexible tool that allows faculty members to create quizzes and surveys. It is called “Original Test and Survey”. It provides the option for instructors to create tests as self-check quizzes, allowing students to submit them as many times as wanted.

There are not too many free decent alternatives to online quizzes. Hopefully Google will do something about it soon. For the time being, the best alternatives we have found are:

ClassMarker. [http://www.classmarker.com/]  The free version allows the creation of a functional HTML-based self-check quiz.  It is not possible to provide feedback per question. The data submitted is not saved so it is not possible to know how many quizzes have been submitted and what their results are. The educational version provides extra features; it costs around $25 dollars per year.

QuestionWriter. [http://www.questionwriter.com/free-quiz-software.html] . It is a Windows platform desktop software that generates Flash-based quizzes. The free version allows the creation of functional quizzes which have the limitation of including just multiple choice questions. It has the functionality of providing feedback per question and to submit the quiz results to the instructor’s email address. The commercial license costs $195 (one time payment).

Please, do let us know if you happen to know about some other similar free tools!

IC Video > Marketing Your Distance Education Program: Experiences and Challenges

The Office of Instructional Consulting in Indiana University School of Education recently hosted the first in a series of forums on distance education and online learning. This session focused on important aspects of marketing online programs. Darren Klein–Director of Marketing, Kelley Direct Programs, Larry Mikulecky—Coordinator of the online Literacy, Culture, and Language Education Program, and Ted Frick, Associate Professor of Instructional Systems Technology shared their experiences and challenges of marketing their online programs and provided insight on how to effectively market online courses and program offerings. The streaming video is available on the IC website.