Student time spent on flipped classes

[Liquidambar]

I have typically used most of my class time for content delivery, with occasional interactive activities that don't require advance preparation by students.  When we switched to remote teaching, I started having students prepare for class in advance and take a reading quiz.  Then our synchronous class time was very abbreviated, mostly Q&A and me addressing issues that showed up in the reading quiz.

I enjoyed having prepared students in class, and I liked knowing in advance their areas of confusion.  I'd like to move to more of a flipped classroom in the future, when life returns to normal.  However, my course evals indicated that students felt like they were spending a lot more time on my course because they had to prepare for class and come to class.  How does this work for people who usually teach flipped classes?  Do students spend more time on your class than on traditional lecture classes?  Even if not, do they perceive themselves as spending more time and resent it?  Or do they accept it better if this is the format from the very beginning of the semester?

[polly_mer]

The gen ed students generally were very resentful because they couldn't coast and really had to do 2-3h out of class for every hour in class.  Starting from the beginning of the term didn't help much, except for the people who dropped almost immediately.

The students who wanted to learn noted the good use of in-class time to get help with the hard parts.

[Morden]

A colleague who did flipped classrooms long before the pandemic said that when he first started, his course evals went down because students felt that he wasn't doing his job (teaching them); they had to teach themselves. He started explicitly talking to students about why they were doing flipped work and how it would help them perform better in the future. He also referred to research to bolster his case. His course evals went back up.

[Bonnie]

A colleague who did flipped classrooms long before the pandemic said that when he first started, his course evals went down because students felt that he wasn't doing his job (teaching them); they had to teach themselves. He started explicitly talking to students about why they were doing flipped work and how it would help them perform better in the future. He also referred to research to bolster his case. His course evals went back up.

This. All of this. You need to explain to students what you are doing and why you are doing it. Do put what you do in terms of teaching actions. I now actually explain to my students how I estimate the amount of time I am asking of them each week (how I estimate reading time, how I estimate video/other media review time, how I estimate homework and project time).

[polly_mer]

A colleague who did flipped classrooms long before the pandemic said that when he first started, his course evals went down because students felt that he wasn't doing his job (teaching them); they had to teach themselves. He started explicitly talking to students about why they were doing flipped work and how it would help them perform better in the future. He also referred to research to bolster his case. His course evals went back up.

This. All of this. You need to explain to students what you are doing and why you are doing it. Do put what you do in terms of teaching actions. I now actually explain to my students how I estimate the amount of time I am asking of them each week (how I estimate reading time, how I estimate video/other media review time, how I estimate homework and project time).

The extra explanation helped with students who wanted to learn and are involved in their own education. 

The students who wanted to check a gen ed box in the least painful way for them were unmoved by the explanations and indeed were then angry about that additional "wasted time" that could have been spoon-feeding-for-memorization lecture.

[lightning]

The hardest part for me is not the lazy students and them thinking that I'm not teaching them (holding their hand). Screw 'em.

The hard part is that you REALLY have to know your content, and that takes a lot of additional work on the instructor's part. Even the most basic flipped classroom activity, of starting each real-time class activity with "What questions do you have about the material?" can expose a teacher who does not know the content.

In a flipped format, a non-expert cannot just coast through the class by circumscribing the material.

Flipped keeps me on my toes, that's for sure.

[Bonnie]

The students who wanted to check a gen ed box in the least painful way for them were unmoved by the explanations and indeed were then angry about that additional "wasted time" that could have been spoon-feeding-for-memorization lecture.

I do have the benefit of only teaching major required courses. To freshmen and sophomores, but I can still count on most having a bit of interest in learning.

[Aster]

A colleague who did flipped classrooms long before the pandemic said that when he first started, his course evals went down because students felt that he wasn't doing his job (teaching them); they had to teach themselves. He started explicitly talking to students about why they were doing flipped work and how it would help them perform better in the future. He also referred to research to bolster his case. His course evals went back up.

This. All of this. You need to explain to students what you are doing and why you are doing it. Do put what you do in terms of teaching actions. I now actually explain to my students how I estimate the amount of time I am asking of them each week (how I estimate reading time, how I estimate video/other media review time, how I estimate homework and project time).

The extra explanation helped with students who wanted to learn and are involved in their own education. 

The students who wanted to check a gen ed box in the least painful way for them were unmoved by the explanations and indeed were then angry about that additional "wasted time" that could have been spoon-feeding-for-memorization lecture.

This. Big Urban College operates with mostly this student demographic. It doesn't matter one bit how many explanations, graphical charts, how-to guides, etc. I make. I've done all of this, and continue to do more. If you work at a non-selective institution in a region with high ratios of non-college-ready high school graduates, students go for the least effort approach. They resent anything requiring more effort, no matter what you do or say.

[Aster]

In a flipped format, a non-expert cannot just coast through the class by circumscribing the material.

In my experience, it's the complete opposite.

Students teach themselves in a flipped format. The professor is mostly just a facilitator for assigning work, and an assessor of submitted work.

A non-expert can coast through a flipped format because he/she is not actually teaching any content anymore, or never if they're relying on provided instructional content (e.g. textbook readings, publisher provided presentations).

At Big Urban College, we have this down to a science with many of our adjunct professors. A "lead" tenure track professor will spoon-feed all of the instructional and assessment content to the adjunct faculty to follow. The adjunct faculty are little more than T.A.'s. They don't even have to know what they're teaching, because in a pure flipped format, there isn't much (or any) formal instruction.

The biggest labor involvement with a flipped classroom is with it's normally much higher quantity of assessment. All that extra assessment has to be created, coherently scheduled for daily use, and graded rapidly. It's basically a laboratory course curriculum model.

[polly_mer]

In a flipped format, a non-expert cannot just coast through the class by circumscribing the material.

In my experience, it's the complete opposite.

Students teach themselves in a flipped format. The professor is mostly just a facilitator for assigning work, and an assessor of submitted work.

My experience is like lightning's: I started with the flipped classroom from my first university assignment and only found out how easy teaching could be much later when I went to a mostly lecture course for a new prep where lecture was the best option.

Creating all the work so that students can "teach themselves" means knowing a lot about the material and how people learn it.  Being ready to answer any off-the-wall question was much harder the first couple times through a course when I didn't know "all" the pitfalls and thus hadn't prepared enough bridges in the assigned material for the students.

Even later when I kept teaching science for teachers, I had much less prep every term, but circulating the room for 2 hours to facilitate thinking/trying/student effort was much harder on me than even a 3h lecture where I had control of pacing and knew what came next.

[lightning]

In a flipped format, a non-expert cannot just coast through the class by circumscribing the material.

In my experience, it's the complete opposite.

Students teach themselves in a flipped format. The professor is mostly just a facilitator for assigning work, and an assessor of submitted work.

A non-expert can coast through a flipped format because he/she is not actually teaching any content anymore, or never if they're relying on provided instructional content (e.g. textbook readings, publisher provided presentations).

At Big Urban College, we have this down to a science with many of our adjunct professors. A "lead" tenure track professor will spoon-feed all of the instructional and assessment content to the adjunct faculty to follow. The adjunct faculty are little more than T.A.'s. They don't even have to know what they're teaching, because in a pure flipped format, there isn't much (or any) formal instruction.

The biggest labor involvement with a flipped classroom is with it's normally much higher quantity of assessment. All that extra assessment has to be created, coherently scheduled for daily use, and graded rapidly. It's basically a laboratory course curriculum model.

Yes, a university can certainly design a top-down curriculum so that the path for learning is very linear, controlled, and circumscribed, even when students are tasked to originate and navigate their path through the material. However, that's not flipped, by my definition. That's BS.

Here's a little flipped 101 you can pass on to your Big Urban administrators. Each student that walks in through the door has to write one question on the board before they sit down. Teacher answers or calls on students to answer the questions that most students want answered (and enforcing quality control and elaboration and inspiring/facilitating discussion about the answers).

After that activity, go desk to desk (either 1-on-1 &/or desk presenting to larger group) and ask students to demonstrate what they learned from the assigned homework (here you might grade as you go and you might embed enterprise-wide assessments), with teachers elaborating, correcting, amplifying, etc. Prompt them with content, if students need eliciting.

Teacher summarizes everything heard at end of class with observations & over-arching concepts, goes over problems that come up over and over again with most students (especially how to learn the content on one's own), connects stuff generated with other similar or dissimilar stuff, offers portals for deeper understanding, and then gives a little mini-motivational speech, relays announcements and reminders, and attempts to make a personal connection with some students that may need it.

This is one way to do a typical flipped day, but you have to be a scholar-teacher (know your content COLD) to do this day in and day out. Not everyone is up to this, so I'm sure there are places like yours that have to can and circumscribe a curriculum that is easy for the glorified T.A. with the electric can opener.

Or maybe your faculty is ready to do what I just described, and you are all just suffocating and suffering under Assessment, standardization, and death-by-rubric administrator hacks who use flipped as a fashionable buzz word (which, BTW, is a really passé eduwonk buzz word).

[spork]

I have typically used most of my class time for content delivery, with occasional interactive activities that don't require advance preparation by students.  When we switched to remote teaching, I started having students prepare for class in advance and take a reading quiz.  Then our synchronous class time was very abbreviated, mostly Q&A and me addressing issues that showed up in the reading quiz.

I enjoyed having prepared students in class, and I liked knowing in advance their areas of confusion.  I'd like to move to more of a flipped classroom in the future, when life returns to normal.  However, my course evals indicated that students felt like they were spending a lot more time on my course because they had to prepare for class and come to class.  How does this work for people who usually teach flipped classes?  Do students spend more time on your class than on traditional lecture classes?  Even if not, do they perceive themselves as spending more time and resent it?  Or do they accept it better if this is the format from the very beginning of the semester?

Rather than quizzes on readings, I use this reading response writing assignment. Compared to quizzes, the upside is that students practice argumentative reasoning and produce material they can use/refer to during discussions in class (they are forced to think harder and fear looking stupid in front of peers). Downside is that quizzes, if multiple choice or true/false, can be machine graded by the LMS.

I assume students spend more time studying for my courses than they do for courses that are nothing but lectures and exams. In fact I hope so. And yes, some resent it, mostly students from other majors who need three credits to fulfill some requirement. But I am tenured, know the cognitive science about how people learn, and don't care about students who think college means sitting in classrooms for eight semesters memorizing and regurgitating facts.

[the_geneticist]

Students would rather have the instructor explain the material first, and then do any practice problems at home (or not at all).  Instructors would rather the students do the reading first and be able to do more interesting and in-depth activities in class.  It's a really tough sell a lot of places to convince students that it would be worth their time to learn the basics outside of class.  I tried a semi-flipped approach in a majors class at a SLAC and had to stop.  The epic whining from asking them to do work outside of class was ridiculous (but we have sports & clubs & friends!).  They hated that it was obvious if they were unprepared for class (you are making me feel bad!  no fair!).  I switched to a "mini lecture" followed by "practice problems" during class.
No way I'd do a flipped classroom unless the students were expected to do it in most of their classes.

[spork]

Students would rather have the instructor explain the material first, and then do any practice problems at home (or not at all).  Instructors would rather the students do the reading first and be able to do more interesting and in-depth activities in class.  It's a really tough sell a lot of places to convince students that it would be worth their time to learn the basics outside of class.  I tried a semi-flipped approach in a majors class at a SLAC and had to stop.  The epic whining from asking them to do work outside of class was ridiculous (but we have sports & clubs & friends!).  They hated that it was obvious if they were unprepared for class (you are making me feel bad!  no fair!).  I switched to a "mini lecture" followed by "practice problems" during class.
No way I'd do a flipped classroom unless the students were expected to do it in most of their classes.

It would be nice if faculty could present the data on how effective studying outside of class is associated with academic performance in a way that students would accept. I have tried to use the "how many hours of practice each week does it take to become a good soccer player?" analogy without success.

[polly_mer]

I sat through an undergrad research presentation a few years ago that used surveys regarding study time at Super Dinky.

I asked follow-up questions related to the results.  The students were surprised to learn about the 2 hours of study for every hour in the classroom expectation.  The researchers mentioned their suspicions that athletes filling out the survey just outside coaches' offices were probably exaggerating the study time at 10 h per week total.

The researchers had no answer for why someone would lie at a study level so far below expectations of about 30 h (15 credits * 2 h) to impress the coaches.

A spirited discussion ensued because the seniors in this course were sure that 10 h of study every week total was a lot. My colleague teaching the class (and chair of that major that prepares people for jobs that are usually more than full-time) was taking notes to give lectures to counteract that misconception much earlier in the major.