Flipping with a JIgsaw, Part 2

Part 2: The Mechanics of Flipping

On one level, flipping is merely an extension of an approach that instructors have been using for decades: active learning. While listening to lectures has been around for centuries, pedagogical experts have been pushing active learning in various forms. And many instructors have heard and heeded the call for active learning, myself included. Flipping changes the typical way of thinking about active learning, from an occasional interruption of lecture to its replacement. The logic behind flipping is that students are most likely to benefit from instructor attention when they are trying to engage with the content, and if they are doing this outside of class time they are unable to make use of that help. Here’s a way to look at typical and flipped courses:

Traditional: deliver content in class, ask students to engage with content outside of class

Flipped: deliver content outside of class, ask students to engage with content in class

The benefits of flipped classes are easiest to see in classes where there are problem sets students must complete, like mathematics and science. Asking students to do these outside of class often leads to frustration (for instructor and student) and incomplete assignments. So a flipped class turns it around so that the more passive (and I say ‘more’ because there are ways to make even this more interactive) activity of listening to lectures is done outside of class. This saves class time for students to work on the problem sets while the instructor is there to answer questions and help them when they are stuck. But this can work in other disciplines as well, as my experience shows.

I guess the other event that facilitated my flipping was the emergence of technology that allows instructors to easily create content that can be delivered remotely, asynchronously. I simply mean the ability to record lectures or presentations so that students can view them on their own time. While there are quite a variety of methods for doing this, the most significant are narration in Microsoft PowerPoint and screencasting. PowerPoint is of course the ubiquitous presentation software that can assist in sublime lectures or bog them down in mind-numbing volumes of text and distracting transition effects. In any case, PowerPoint is easy to learn and use, and the last two versions included the ability to record narrations of the slides and save the file in a format (.mp4) that makes it into a video that can be watched, paused, rewinded, and rewatched like a YouTube video (in fact they can be uploaded to YouTube). If an instructor already has PowerPoint presentations for traditional classes, it is an easy matter to record the audio that goes with the slides (although this approach has some dangers). Screencasting has grown in popularity recently, and there are now several companies that offer screencasting software or services. Screencasting simply means recording whatever appears on the screen of your computer (or tablet, or smartphone) in real-time, including recording the system sound and/or narration. I use Screencast-O-Matic (http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/), and can recommend it for its ease-of-use and low cost (free for basic accounts, $15/year for a Pro account), but there are others as well. I have used screencasting to demonstrate features in MS Word, give a guided tour of a LMS course site, record lectures using Prezi, and much more. The more I screencast the more uses I think of for it. Truly a revolution for me.

So for me the cost of flipping in terms of creating the content was nearly zero: I had already created narrated PowerPoint presentations, uploaded to YouTube, and embedded them into my course in our LMS for the online version of the course. It was simply a matter of copying them to the LMS course for my flipped class and I was set to go. (I should mention that I also use a textbook for the class, and I assign chapters, or parts of them, for each class meeting.)

But that’s only half the challenge of flipping; the other half is what to do in class with all that time that used to be spent lecturing. Here’s where the jigsaw comes in.

Next up: The Jigsaw Classroom