comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn!
Oh, I shouldn't like THAT!'"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Clearly Alice wasn't a life-long learner.
A faculty member approached me a while ago about linking materials from a third-party provider to Blackboard because she wanted to flip her classroom. Easy enough to do, but I suggested we talk about some of the challenges of flipping so she could make the most out of the experience. Based on what I saw of the online materials, they were a bunch of videos already available on YouTube (and of varying quality) along with some electronic exercises. And an e-book. Somewhere in there, there were links to an e-book.
I wanted to talk to her about how she would guide her students use of the videos. How would she ensure that her students learned what they needed to learn for the discussions and activities she was using in class? Would she provide them with some guiding questions? Objectives that should be met? Would she provide electronic quizzes so they could test their knowledge and then review what they didn't understand? I tried to explain that to her, but I'm not sure my point sunk in. She was so excited about flipping her classroom, that I don't think she grasped the preparation needed to make the best use of those technology resources.
Flipping a classroom in its purest form is moving the initial levels of Bloom's taxonomy out of the classroom to make more time for learning at the higher levels in the classroom. The traditional approach is to focus on the understand, remember, and apply levels in the classroom through lecture and discussion, while addressing the higher order levels outside the classroom through homework, longer term projects, research papers, for example. The idea is it is relatively easy for students to assess their understanding of those initial levels, and to review and relearn what they don't understand. However, it is harder for them to assess their understanding at the higher levels - but you, as a teacher, are often not available to aid them in that assessment when they are trying to learn those skills.
That's the point I tried to make to the above mentioned faculty member. At the same time, I become involved in a grant where the grant committee decided to employ the flipped classroom to provide technology-enhanced instruction to a certain set of curricula. Now, I have my issues with that approach, particularly since it was chosen before deciding which course to flip and it was the only technology enhancement to be used, but that wasn't my decision. However, the way we flipped the course was.
The committee seemed to be focused on lecture capture. Unfortunately, we don't really have the resources to support that college-wide, and part of the purpose of the grant was to transform the institution - that meant anything we did in the curricula covered by the grant needed to be easily applied to others. I was determined, therefore, to use readily available materials already available on the web, and not create a lot of our own.
Here's what I had to work with. The students would access the flipped materials through Blackboard Learn. The course was an engineering graphics course that used AutoCAD; the textbook included a DVD with tutorials on it. AutoDESK (the makers of AutoCAD) provide a lot on resources; there are a number of videos on YouTube created by other AutoCAD users and teachers. There really wasn't any point in creating any videos of our own, since the book provided some and others were already available online.
Here's how I applied (most of) Gagne's instructional events.
Inform learners of objectives
Stimulate recall of prior learning
I created folders in Blackboard, one for each major drawing project the student had to complete. In each folder, I started with a list of "objectives." These are not traditional performance objectives I would write for outcomes assessment; these are just designed to give students an idea of what they should know before coming to class. For example, here is the list for orthographic projection:
Present the content
Provide “learning guidance”
Then I provided them a "work guide," a PDF document they would print out and use to take notes as they read the book, watched the videos, worked through the tutorials. This would be turned in at the beginning of class as "proof" that they did the online work. Here is the guide for orthographic projection.
The final two folders were for AutoDESK resources and for YouTube videos (or other online videos). It was important for them to get used to using the AutoDESK resources to learn, because AutoCAD updates every year, and they will need to be able to teach themselves when new versions are released. I also think it's important for them to be able to see examples of effective tutorial videos. One thing we might do in the future is provide a place in Blackboard (a discussion board or a wiki...maybe a blog) where they can share resources they found useful. That will let us update the course in the future, and help them learn about to find good resources on their own.
Elicit performance (practice)
Provide feedback
Finally, they had a mastery quiz. The quiz tested at the remembering and understanding levels, with maybe a couple of application questions. It consists of all objective questions, so students get immediate feedback. They can take it as many times as they want with no time limit, but they are advice to repeat it until they reached mastery of 80%.
As of the time I'm writing this, they have completed the first unit. 88% of the active students in the course completed the mastery quiz, and all of them attained an 80% or higher. Many of them repeated the quiz until the received a perfect score. Note that they don't get a grade for doing any of that work; their only incentive is to be prepared to work on their projects in class.
Assess performance
Enhance retention and transfer to the job
This is what takes place in the classroom. Instead of doing their AutoCAD projects at home, they now do them in the classroom where the teacher is available to assess how they are doing and to correct any mistakes as they try to make AutoCAD do what they want it to do. He no longer needs to spend time explaining how layers work, for example, and can instead just tell them to go to their dimensions layer. That gives them more time in the classroom actuallty USING AutoCAD instead of talking about using AutoCAD, which, of course, leads to more effective learning.
So far, so good. For the first two modules, 94% of enrolled students completed the mastery quiz, with 94% of them achieving mastery on the first module and 88% on the second. Of the ones who did not achieve mastery (set at 80%), all but one was within 5% of mastery. We don't have long-term data yet on how the flipped materials affect performance on higher order learning activities, but it's off to a good start.
The key to our (albeit limited, so far) sucess was not the use of videos. It was the use of guided, active learning activities combined with videos and student self-assessment with immediate feedback. Just throwing some YouTubes together does not a flipped classroom make.
A faculty member approached me a while ago about linking materials from a third-party provider to Blackboard because she wanted to flip her classroom. Easy enough to do, but I suggested we talk about some of the challenges of flipping so she could make the most out of the experience. Based on what I saw of the online materials, they were a bunch of videos already available on YouTube (and of varying quality) along with some electronic exercises. And an e-book. Somewhere in there, there were links to an e-book.
I wanted to talk to her about how she would guide her students use of the videos. How would she ensure that her students learned what they needed to learn for the discussions and activities she was using in class? Would she provide them with some guiding questions? Objectives that should be met? Would she provide electronic quizzes so they could test their knowledge and then review what they didn't understand? I tried to explain that to her, but I'm not sure my point sunk in. She was so excited about flipping her classroom, that I don't think she grasped the preparation needed to make the best use of those technology resources.
Side note: As I was discussing the flipped paradigm with someone, he started lecturing me about Bloom's taxonomy. I had to restrain myself from pointing out that I first learned about Bloom's taxonomy before he was born and from showing off by asking how this relates to the psychomotor and affective domains of the taxonomy. Kids these days. Think everything is new just because they just learned about it... ;-)Flipping a classroom is more than just making lecture videos available to students - although that is what comes the mind of most people when you talk about classroom flipping. As I mentioned in a prior blog, I am a big fan of Gagne's instructional events. I think they are as important in a flipped environment as the traditional one, if not more so. Whether you are in the classroom or online, you still need to tell them what they're going to learn, relate it to what they know, guide them through the learning process, see if they learned it and tell them where they went wrong if they didn't, and then make sure they can apply what they learned outside of the classroom. Gagne may have first introduced that idea 50 years ago, but it's still valid.
That's the point I tried to make to the above mentioned faculty member. At the same time, I become involved in a grant where the grant committee decided to employ the flipped classroom to provide technology-enhanced instruction to a certain set of curricula. Now, I have my issues with that approach, particularly since it was chosen before deciding which course to flip and it was the only technology enhancement to be used, but that wasn't my decision. However, the way we flipped the course was.
The committee seemed to be focused on lecture capture. Unfortunately, we don't really have the resources to support that college-wide, and part of the purpose of the grant was to transform the institution - that meant anything we did in the curricula covered by the grant needed to be easily applied to others. I was determined, therefore, to use readily available materials already available on the web, and not create a lot of our own.
Here's what I had to work with. The students would access the flipped materials through Blackboard Learn. The course was an engineering graphics course that used AutoCAD; the textbook included a DVD with tutorials on it. AutoDESK (the makers of AutoCAD) provide a lot on resources; there are a number of videos on YouTube created by other AutoCAD users and teachers. There really wasn't any point in creating any videos of our own, since the book provided some and others were already available online.
Here's how I applied (most of) Gagne's instructional events.
Inform learners of objectives
Stimulate recall of prior learning
I created folders in Blackboard, one for each major drawing project the student had to complete. In each folder, I started with a list of "objectives." These are not traditional performance objectives I would write for outcomes assessment; these are just designed to give students an idea of what they should know before coming to class. For example, here is the list for orthographic projection:
To complete this project, you need to know the following:Later modules include references back to prior modules; for example, the module on tolerancing references back to "objectives" from the module on dimensioning.
In AutoCAD, you should be able to do the following:
- What is orthographic projection?
- What are the different types of lines used in orthographic projection and what do they mean?
- What are the different views used?
- create Layers to control properties like line type, pen width, and color.
- use Blocks to create a title block on your drawing.
- switch between model space and paper space.
Present the content
Provide “learning guidance”
Then I provided them a "work guide," a PDF document they would print out and use to take notes as they read the book, watched the videos, worked through the tutorials. This would be turned in at the beginning of class as "proof" that they did the online work. Here is the guide for orthographic projection.
The final two folders were for AutoDESK resources and for YouTube videos (or other online videos). It was important for them to get used to using the AutoDESK resources to learn, because AutoCAD updates every year, and they will need to be able to teach themselves when new versions are released. I also think it's important for them to be able to see examples of effective tutorial videos. One thing we might do in the future is provide a place in Blackboard (a discussion board or a wiki...maybe a blog) where they can share resources they found useful. That will let us update the course in the future, and help them learn about to find good resources on their own.
Elicit performance (practice)
Provide feedback
Finally, they had a mastery quiz. The quiz tested at the remembering and understanding levels, with maybe a couple of application questions. It consists of all objective questions, so students get immediate feedback. They can take it as many times as they want with no time limit, but they are advice to repeat it until they reached mastery of 80%.
As of the time I'm writing this, they have completed the first unit. 88% of the active students in the course completed the mastery quiz, and all of them attained an 80% or higher. Many of them repeated the quiz until the received a perfect score. Note that they don't get a grade for doing any of that work; their only incentive is to be prepared to work on their projects in class.
Assess performance
Enhance retention and transfer to the job
This is what takes place in the classroom. Instead of doing their AutoCAD projects at home, they now do them in the classroom where the teacher is available to assess how they are doing and to correct any mistakes as they try to make AutoCAD do what they want it to do. He no longer needs to spend time explaining how layers work, for example, and can instead just tell them to go to their dimensions layer. That gives them more time in the classroom actuallty USING AutoCAD instead of talking about using AutoCAD, which, of course, leads to more effective learning.
So far, so good. For the first two modules, 94% of enrolled students completed the mastery quiz, with 94% of them achieving mastery on the first module and 88% on the second. Of the ones who did not achieve mastery (set at 80%), all but one was within 5% of mastery. We don't have long-term data yet on how the flipped materials affect performance on higher order learning activities, but it's off to a good start.
The key to our (albeit limited, so far) sucess was not the use of videos. It was the use of guided, active learning activities combined with videos and student self-assessment with immediate feedback. Just throwing some YouTubes together does not a flipped classroom make.
