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Showing posts from February, 2021

Flipped Classes Part 2: 5 Things to Consider When Flipping your Class

So, in part 1 of this series,  I introduced how I define a flipped class. Along the way, I mentioned a few things that need further details. As promised, here they are! So, without further ado, here are 5 things you need to consider when flipping your class. 1. Student Time I made this first because it's so incredibly important but also the easiest one to forget. Despite all of the benefits of a flipped class, we don't get to ask for more time from students. So, if you are going to require students to do something before class, that absolutely has to be offset by how much is required of them after class. Some of the time they would normally spend on their homework is offset by the fact that they have already gotten some practice during class, but this is a pretty small amount. Generally, the rule of thumb is that for every credit hour the course is, you can require 3 hours per week of student time for the median student. In fact, for lots of universities, this is written as p

Flipped Classes Part 1: What is a flipped class?

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 Welp, I'm getting this out a week later than I had hoped. I blame the first week of classes. I somehow completely forgot how much time it takes to just answer emails at the start of the semester. Though, considering I'm teaching 300 students, I probably should have anticipated that. Anyway, here is the first part of my series on flipped classes.  So, what is a flipped class? This is one of those terms that has been defined by various researchers who developed the idea, but it has also been used so much that it looks different depending on who you talk to. For me, a class is flipped if students are first exposed to some or all of the course content before class time, which frees up some or all of class time for active learning . That's purposefully a bit vague because the exact setup will vary depending on the instructor, the course content, the size of the course, the needs of the students, and of course whether we are attempting to emergency remote teach through the middl