Lecture Prep and Frustration

[Puget]

I did the flipped thing for awhile. It was a TON of frustration when students showed up to class having not watched the videos, rendering the in-class portions useless. I ended up lecturing as I went along anyway, in order to salvage the in-class portions. (This, in addition to students not doing the reading.)

Yes, as much as I like my students and as much as I trust a handful of them to come to class prepared, I think it would work out like this in practice.

Did you have significant points attached to doing the pre-class work? You absolutely have to make the online work a substantial part of the grade- you can't just throw lectures online and expect them to watch them. This is flipped classroom 101.

My online lectures are in short segments with ~5 multiple-choice "learning check" questions between each segment. These are automatically graded in the LMS and they can try repeatedly until they get the right answer. They must complete these before their in person class every week, along with a "thought question" (about 1 paragraph prompt response, based on the lecture and assigned reading). Together, these are worth 25% of the course grade. Not only does this force them to prepare, but it helps them identify key points, reinforces their memory for them, and can be used as practice for exams.

With this, at least 90% of the students complete the online work every week. The remaining 10% are generally really struggling for all sorts of reasons, but having this work flags them for me well before the first exam, so I can try to see what's up and either get them help or encourage them to drop before the deadline as appropriate.

[ciao_yall]

I did the flipped thing for awhile. It was a TON of frustration when students showed up to class having not watched the videos, rendering the in-class portions useless. I ended up lecturing as I went along anyway, in order to salvage the in-class portions. (This, in addition to students not doing the reading.)

Yes, as much as I like my students and as much as I trust a handful of them to come to class prepared, I think it would work out like this in practice.

Did you have significant points attached to doing the pre-class work? You absolutely have to make the online work a substantial part of the grade- you can't just throw lectures online and expect them to watch them. This is flipped classroom 101.

My online lectures are in short segments with ~5 multiple-choice "learning check" questions between each segment. These are automatically graded in the LMS and they can try repeatedly until they get the right answer. They must complete these before their in person class every week, along with a "thought question" (about 1 paragraph prompt response, based on the lecture and assigned reading). Together, these are worth 25% of the course grade. Not only does this force them to prepare, but it helps them identify key points, reinforces their memory for them, and can be used as practice for exams.

With this, at least 90% of the students complete the online work every week. The remaining 10% are generally really struggling for all sorts of reasons, but having this work flags them for me well before the first exam, so I can try to see what's up and either get them help or encourage them to drop before the deadline as appropriate.

^ This. Making them do tangible work that they bring to use in class is essential to making flipped classrooms work. Sometimes they push back in the beginning "but you didn't teach it to us yet so how do we know what to doooooooooo?" but once they get into it they really enjoy being engaged during class time.

It also really helps students stay on top of the work, instead of waiting until the last minute to cram the midterm and pull an all-nighter on the papers/projects.

[ciao_yall]

Y'know why some faculty still lecture? It's because flipped classrooms expose faculty with gaps in their knowledge (amongst the few students who actually engage with the content in flipped classrooms--but it only takes one know-it-all student to expose an unprepared faculty member).

And this is why discussion is so interesting. Students find new sources of information and bring in new insights all the time.

As faculty, we don't know everything about our subject areas. I taught business and my students had way more knowledge of their own industries, countries, cultures, etc than I ever could. My job was to help them frame and apply their knowledge.

[lightning]

I did the flipped thing for awhile. It was a TON of frustration when students showed up to class having not watched the videos, rendering the in-class portions useless. I ended up lecturing as I went along anyway, in order to salvage the in-class portions. (This, in addition to students not doing the reading.)

Yes, as much as I like my students and as much as I trust a handful of them to come to class prepared, I think it would work out like this in practice.

Did you have significant points attached to doing the pre-class work? You absolutely have to make the online work a substantial part of the grade- you can't just throw lectures online and expect them to watch them. This is flipped classroom 101.

My online lectures are in short segments with ~5 multiple-choice "learning check" questions between each segment. These are automatically graded in the LMS and they can try repeatedly until they get the right answer. They must complete these before their in person class every week, along with a "thought question" (about 1 paragraph prompt response, based on the lecture and assigned reading). Together, these are worth 25% of the course grade. Not only does this force them to prepare, but it helps them identify key points, reinforces their memory for them, and can be used as practice for exams.

With this, at least 90% of the students complete the online work every week. The remaining 10% are generally really struggling for all sorts of reasons, but having this work flags them for me well before the first exam, so I can try to see what's up and either get them help or encourage them to drop before the deadline as appropriate.

Yup! All that. I spent a lot of time doing all of that.

Whether it's flipped Classroom 101 or Traditional lecture 101, you can't honestly force truly unprepared and/or unmotivated students to become prepared and motivated. As much as Flipped Classroom was supposed to be better at motivating the un-motivated and remediating the un-prepared, it really didn't. Sure, you can fake it and dumb down the course and drown the course with a lot of assignments to make it look like the course isn't dumbed down and embed the measures into the easy baseline in-class homework assignments guided by teachers in-class so you can get even the most unprepared and unmotivated group of students to look like they are learning something--IOW the typical Assessment maneuvers.

My 5-year run in a freshman level course using Flipped Classroom, was mostly a charade, and I regret spending the extra time preparing those courses. The stipend for the Flipped Classroom course design was not worth it, because it wasn't very much money considering the extra work involved and in the end, even though Flipped is a lot more work, traditional lecture would have achieved more or less the same results. But, it made the admins who were leading the whole Flipped Classroom movement at our campus, look like they were earning their money.

All the Flipped Classroom admins are gone, so I rarely hear the term around my campus anymore.

YMMV.

[Puget]

Well, I'm sorry you had a bad experience Lightning. My milage does indeed vary.

[HigherEd7]

One of the problems I have, and it was mentioned here that students don't read. If you don't read, you can't respond to or ask questions. I do not think any faculty member knows everything about a subject and there are going to be times you will find a student that knows something you don't know just like anything else in life. I take this as a learning experience.

[lightning]

One of the problems I have, and it was mentioned here that students don't read. If you don't read, you can't respond to or ask questions. I do not think any faculty member knows everything about a subject and there are going to be times you will find a student that knows something you don't know just like anything else in life. I take this as a learning experience.

Of course no faculty member can know everything.

However, a faculty member should know all the knowledge that is baseline standard in their field, and usually this baseline standard is higher than what students know.

And, maybe I should add something important:

We get educated as undergrads but towards the end of our senior year, we realize we can't know everything, so we feel no shame in not knowing everything and we don't judge others for not knowing everything.

We get educated as masters students to internalize the common baseline knowledge--the starting point at which the currently unknown knowledge can be much more easily discovered later.

We get educated as PhD students and learn what we can be confident in what we know, but even more importantly, we can be confident in what we do not know. And, this point plays into how we design curriculum, when we decide what to include and what to leave out.