Flipping Your College Classroom - Installment #1 - Start with one lesson

Installment #1

This post begins a series of posts about flipping your college classroom.

The FLIP:  "Focus on your Learners by Involving them in the Process"
Barbi Honeycutt, PhD

"The FLIP is when you intentionally invert the design of a learning environment so students engage in activities, apply concepts, and focus on higher level learning processes during class (Honeycutt 2012)."

I recently purchased the book, "Flipping the College Classroom: Practical Advice from Faculty" by Barbi Honeycutt, PhD. 2016, Magna Publications, ISBN: 978-0-912150-28-4

If you are interested in reading this book, please let me know.  Since I am an academic technologist, my work involves consulting with faculty, providing coaching and training, and investigating new trends in technology for teaching and learning and emerging technologies. I thought that I might attempt to highlight a few of the key points from the book and offer my thoughts about integrating some specific technology tools for flipping your course.

Start with one lesson:

Break the lesson down into four parts:

1) the purpose
2) the prior-to-class activities
3) the in-class activities
4) the closing

Let's focus on the prior-to-class activities first.  "You need to have a strategy for holding students accountable for completing the prior-to-class work (Honeycutt, p18)."

In order to hold students accountable for actually completing the prior-to-class work, for example if they were assigned to view a video, here are some assessment techniques that you could use.

If they were assigned to view a video, there are various tools available that enable you to embed quiz questions within the video.

• VoiceThread (integrated with Moodle)
• EDpuzzle (allows you to prevent skipping ahead and requires they answer the questions before the video will continue)
• TED-Ed Lessons
• Camtasia Studio

Other assessment methods include:

1. Asking students to write a one-minute paper upon arrival at class to summarize key points from the video.
2. Assigning students to post to Q&A Moodle forum and ask 2-3 questions about the material covered in the video. This forum type requires students to first post their answers to the questions before they are allowed to view other students' posts.
3. Creating a Moodle Quiz that students need to complete prior to class.

The next installment in this series of posts will pick up where this one left off, and I will cover my suggestions for in-class activities.