The Post-Lecture Classroom 169
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic reports on a study into reversing the typical lecture/homework educational method. The study had students watch lecture videos at home, then use class time to work on activities. After three years of trials, the researchers found both a student preference for the new method and a 5% increase in exam scores. 'In 2012, that flipped model looked like this: At home, before class, students watched brief lecture modules, which introduced them to the day's content. They also read a textbook — the same, introductory-level book as in 2011 — before they arrived. When they got to class, Mumper would begin by asking them "audience response" questions. He'd put a multiple-choice question about the previous night's lectures on a PowerPoint slide and ask all the students to respond via small, cheap clickers. He'd then look at their response, live, as they answered, and address any inconsistencies or incorrect beliefs revealed. Maybe 50 percent of the class got the wrong answer to one of these questions: This gave him an opportunity to lecture just enough so that students could understand what they got wrong. Then, the class would split up into pairs, and Mumper would ask them a question which required them to apply the previous night's content... The pairs would discuss an answer, then share their findings with the class. At the end of that section, Mumper would go over any points relevant to the question which he felt the class failed to bring up.'"
Something similar in high school ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the early 1990s, I had a high school math teacher who would assign the homework *before* she taught the lesson.
You were expected to read the chapter, try to do the homework, and then she'd answer any questions that you might have the next day in class.
You then had another night to correct whatever you needed before the homework was due. (and then start your reading for the next day's class).
It was 20+ years ago, but I seem to recall she'd hit us with quizzes as least once a week ... I just can't remember if they were at the beginning of the class, or the end. (and if they were at the beginning, were they on the reading from the night before, or two nights before?)
Homework on topic due before its lecture ... (Score:2)
Back in the early 1990s, I had a high school math teacher who would assign the homework *before* she taught the lesson. You were expected to read the chapter, try to do the homework, and then she'd answer any questions that you might have the next day in class. You then had another night to correct whatever you needed before the homework was due. (and then start your reading for the next day's class).
My second year calculus professor did something similar, except that the homework on a topic was collected before his lecture, no turn ins once the lecture begins. We had to read appropriate sections, figure it out on our own well enough to do the homework, do the homework and then in the professor's opinion we were "qualified" to hear his lecture. Needless to say when this was announced on day 1 half the class dropped. I stuck with it, my job made this my only open time slot.
As difficult as it was I hav
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My college calculus coursed did essentially the same thing. The last half hour a each class was presenting an intro to the new topic, homework and reading were assigned, the first hour of the next class was on clarification, answering questions, going through especially difficult problems from the take home work. Then the last half hour introduced the next topic.
It worked wonderfully with my learning style, if you understood the intro well enough and could handle the work without doing the reading you did
5% (Score:2)
I suppose you could argue that they are close enough not to matter, but I am still curious.
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Is that 5% increase additive or multiplicative?
I don't know, the dog ate my videotape.
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If they're being correct, which they may not be, then 5% is multiplicative. Percent changes are always multiplicative. If you're talking about additive changes, the term is "percentage points".
Unfortunately, lazy speaking sometimes causes people to say "percent" when they mean "percentage points".
Re: 5% (Score:2)
I would guess additive. If only to make a better headline.
Given your example, they could call it a 3.5 or 5% increase and be factually accurate. Why not opt for the better-sounding one?
Sounds like law school. (Score:5, Informative)
Now.. the only problem is most lawyers I know (myself included) felt like we didn't actually
I wonder how this works for, say, history.
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The thing about the Socratic method is that it requires instructors to be able to understand and shape the way a class is going to move if there is a specific topic's learning to be achieved. This requires the instructor to have resources, an expansive knowledge to prevent endless lack of answers, and a body of students who actually wish to get something out of the class. Not an easy recipe in many schools.
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and business school ... (Score:3)
That's basically the socratic method (still beloved in law schools) ... I wonder how this works for, say, history.
It works well in business school too, at least for micro and macro economics and some strategy classes.
As a computer science undergraduate who was also a history geek taking a history class every quarter for fun I would speculate that it would work well in history as well. The book and lectures can go into the facts and provide some background to the environment that events took place in. The lectures could focus on discussions as to why the various players made the decisions that they did, what influenc
Start 'em young ... (Score:2)
Yes, we should get all of our students used to unpaid overtime now.
Instead of relying on a teacher to teach the material, we'll ask them to learn it on their own.
Really, what fraction of students are going to watch a video of a lecture (ecch, sounds horrible) outside of school hours?
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The key is, there's no reason to watch the video. Go to class and learn from the questions asked. What would be even more valuable is, instead of cramming 1 hour of lecture into each hour of class, take the first ten or fifteen minutes going over basics, and have the students discuss/ask/analyse what they have just been taught. Provide supplemental material for those who want to know more.
The most fatal flaw in most homework is that it assumes the student will understand the material sufficiently without
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Uh, in college the expectation is 2 hours out of class for every hour in class if you want to do well, expecting to just show up for lecture and do well is a sure way to fail.
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we'll ask them to learn it on their own.
And . . .?
/effort/ to push above the rest.
That's basically just admitting the truth that teachers cannot teach anything beyond a basic level of knowledge. At some point in life - before college level courses - you have to either accept that you are responsible for your own education, or put up with a hap-hazard and shoddy education. Isn't that what defines the meritocratic system - you earn your place in life by putting in the time and
This may be a philosophical difference - but I have no problem _a
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Instead of relying on a teacher to teach the material, we'll ask them to learn it on their own.
Yes, because asking students to think for themselves and ask the professor about points they didn't understand isn't "teaching" them.... obviously.
Really, what fraction of students are going to watch a video of a lecture (ecch, sounds horrible) outside of school hours?
The same amount that would do the proper studying outside of class to wreck the curve for all the "it's only an intro course" slackers that can't be bothered to even show up to class. I.E. the ones that actually want to learn the stuff they are paying to learn.
In use now (Score:2)
My son is taking Algebra II class in college that is using this method. So far, so good. He says that being able to watch the lecture, then go into class to ask the instructor questions relating to the lecture and the homework is like having a tutor.
I don't know how well it would work for more "not centric" classes, though.
5%? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only downside, parent backlash (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience, the only downside to "flipping" a classroom is parent backlash. With a flipped classroom, the kids watch 10-15 minute videos and, to the parents, this is the kid just spending more time in front of an idiot box and don't really interact with the parents.
With a normal classroom, you lecture in class and then give the kids problems to do at home. Even if the parent has no idea what they are doing and "helps" the kids by making mistakes, undermines your lesson, etc., they still feel like they are spending "quality" time with their kids. This anecdote persists even though studies show kids spend either almost zero time on the work to get to the fun stuff OR they spend twice as long trying to do it because their support system doesn't know either and has to teach themselves first.
The funny thing is, with attentive parents, this actually helps because the parents can watch the videos with the kids and, when a big project comes, they actually can help them at home because they learned the basics when the kid did or are able to go back and watch the pertinent lecture.
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For what it's worth, from TFA:
While 75 percent of students in 2012 said, before Mumper’s class, that they preferred lectures, almost 90 percent of students said they preferred the flipped model after the class.
So it looks like the backlash is relatively minor.
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When I hear, I forget.
When I see, I remember.
When I do, I understand.
I forget who the originator was.
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welcome to different but the same (Score:3)
sure it's a 5% improvement. having one class that's fundamentally different than all the others is a memory aid. of course.
but honestly, if all of your courses -- I had 7 at a time -- had an hour lecture for me to watch at home, would you watch 7 hours of lecture videos on your own? with no ability to interupt and ask for a clarification?
this just totally removes any concept of humans teaching humans. now it's about students learning on their own, and being corrected by teachers. sure it'll work, that's how business management and supervision works. it requires dedicated devotion. it's not something that students have any interest in doing.
if you're not going to teach me, I was always able to learn on my own. I never needed you to supervise the learning process.
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Again, it works better BECAUSE it's not common. It falls apart when it becomes common. It's like left-handed athletes -- the dominant minority effect.
I don't care how much work they are doing to create the videos. If they aren't around when I'm working with it, then they aren't the one teaching me. It's that simple.
I don't need to pay whatever tuition (plus general taxes), to learn from a recording. The value in those funds is to have the human being there so I can interupt at any moment. Otherwise,
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Doesn't make any different to the value calculation. If I'm alone in a room, it's not fun. I'm not willing to pay for not fun. I can learn in a library all by myself at any time. It's worth the same dollar-fifty that it always was. I don't want to ask questions three days later. I want to ask questions when the question presents itself. You expect me to keep a list of questions for tomorrow's class? And then what, run through them one-by-one? And then, re-watch the video again?
Value isn't determine
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Just because you are a fucking moron doesn't make this a bad deal.
As for the questions bullshit you just spewed, you are probably one of those asshats that has to interrupt the professor 10 times right during the middle of the lecture throwing both him and his other students off stride.
And by the way value is determined exactly by results. It's best results for / time / money / ETC. That means, as we are speaking about here, spending the same amount of time ( either lecture + study at home / in a "borin
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a) I am one of those who interupts constantly. There's a good reason for doing so.
b) it's not the results, look you said time, money and etc. etc is effort. welcome to the demand side of economics.
c) again, and this was my first point, this technique is only successful because it isn't popular. it'll be worse than the current norm once it becomes the norm. that's what makes it a bad deal. nothing else.
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Being a bright bulb who read ahead to discover that the current lesson is a lie is a good one.
It should be noted... (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be noted that studies have consistently shown that pretty much any change in methodology leads to higher marks the first time is tested, as students place extra effort on the face of an unknown teaching technique. The challenge is to produce gains that are lasting, once the students have gotten used to taking classes this way.
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Well test score will never improve overall, as they are all bell curved to be the same year after year.
What about the post theory classroom (Score:2)
where you learn more hands on with skills that you need to do your job.
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Turns out that while it's good in theory, it's pretty bad in practice.
One: if you can learn the job by doing the job, there's no point in going to uni.
Two: you're reducing the breadth of knowledge imparted for increased depth, so your programmes become increasingly specific, pigeonholing people even further based on a decision made at 17 years old. My decision at 17 was to be a game programmer... thankfully I did a general "computer science" degree, not "game development"... I knew I didn't want to work in
it's the level of theory not hands on only or theo (Score:2)
it's the level of theory not hands on only or theory only.
To much theory is not good and for some stuff do you really need to know about stuff like the low level file system stuff to make a game where the os does the file system work for you?? Low level GPU coding or open gl codeing?
What about networking / system admin work where you need to know about the higher level stuff and need to know some vendor stuff?
Case method (Score:3)
There is a case assigned for each class and students read/watch videos related to the class. They formulate a solution to the problem. In class the group discusses it or listens to a lecture from someone who actually worked in the company in the case or is involved directly with the issue.
Often the class arrives at a solution together which is very different from what they had thought before they came to the class.Some stick to their original opinion. etc.
This works great for problems in business or in engineering design where there is no single ideal solution. If you have to design a sailboat to race , you have multiple choices, catamaran, windsails, mutiple sails etc. If each student designs his/her own ideal boat and an actual boat designer who actually built a boat for racing tells you why this would/ would not work, it approximates on the job training.
Ugh (Score:5, Informative)
I'm currently three weeks into a Physics class that's modeled on this concept. Let me tell you what it's like.
In theory: Students review the lecture material on their own time. In class, the instructor presents some Physics problems on the topic. The students work through them together in teams and learn from each other, and the instructor reviews each team's work to help them get past sticking points.
In practice: I review the lecture material on my own time. My classmates do not. They show up largely unprepared, and when presented with a basic problem, simply stare at it until someone else explains the entire problem to them. Typically, that means that I end up teaching my classmates Physics, and then showing them how I solved each of the problems. I need to do that, because a significant part of my grade is based on the performance of my team - i.e., the average of individual quiz scores of the members of my team.
The instructor routinely harangues students to come to class prepared, and is assigning increasing amounts of busywork to be performed outside of class to ensure that work is being done.
So for me - a very reliable self-starter and independent studier - this class model means that in addition to learning all of the material on my own, I also have to (1) spend several hours in class teaching the material to my classmates, (2) have my grade dragged down by my team members' poor performance, and (3) have to complete additional work outside of class to prove that I'm keeping up. In other words, of the 10+ hours a week that this class is requiring, LESS THAN HALF is spent learning the material and honing skills; the rest (including the 4+ hours of class time) is simply wasted, thanks to this poorly implemented learning model.
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> Flipping the classroom and making you work in teams are completely different things.
That's true, but you've missed my general point, which is: For students who are good at learning on their own - i.e., the cream of the crop - class time spent on verifying that they are learning the material is a complete waste of their time.
That is actually my biggest complaint. Typically, I would spend two hours in a traditional lecture learning, and four hours outside of class with independent learning and skill
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Re:Ugh (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me you have only learned half the lesson this method of pedagogy is meant to teach. Why don't you find the other well-prepared and conscientious students in your class, work with them, and shut out the losers?
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> It seems to me you have only learned half the lesson this method of pedagogy is meant to teach. Why don't you find the other well-prepared and conscientious students in your class, work with them, and shut out the losers?
Because the teams are assigned arbitrarily and we can't switch. We are required to sink or swim with the other schlumps in our team, irrespective of any differences in effort or intelligence. End of story.
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Did your professor explain how this benefits *you* as a student in his class? Because you are the one paying thousands of dollars for this experience. It sounds to me like your professor is intentionally teaching his students to be parasites*, in which case it is strongly in your interest to transfer to a better university. You don't want your diploma to come from the same institution as all of those losers.
*The reason for this could that it minimizes the amount of whining and grade-grubbing he has to put u
Special snowflake alert (Score:2)
Right, because doing that is trivial. After all, every medium-sized town has at least 174 top tier colleges to choose from.
Why are you assuming they're going to graduate? This isn't the whole course, just one module. The first time the slackers hi
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I know college has dumbed down a lot since I went (meaning no offense to the hard-working students who suffer as a result), but it is still not high school. A reasonable professor will listen to you if you request students be allowed to self-organize. Especially if the five or ten best students in class make the request at once. A reasonable professor is probably looking for ways to motivate the leeches to do their own work, and may welcome my suggestion.
If the professor does not listen, and cannot justify
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Re:Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
You should actually be very happy with this situation (except maybe the grading part - I'm an assistant prof. myself and I detest group-based grades, but for budgetary/policy reasons cannot always avoid them).
The absolutely best way to learn about a topic is to instruct people. By teaching your teammates the subject matter you are engaging with it in a much more intensive way than if you just learn and practice yourself. Explaining something requires a deeper and more complete understanding and responding to questions, even questions that seem stupid to you, forces you to express (and hence explicate) thoughts and connections that you understood already, but probably mainly implicitly. Add the nearby professor for the cases where you can't explain it and you are receiving an excellent education. As a professor, getting the top-tier students to explain the material to the rest is a job very well done.
(That said, I sympathize with your frustration at other students not putting enough effort into it, and I don't want to say that it is a good thing, just that it will also have good effects...)
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You're being prepped for the real world.
In all seriousness, your impressions of the flipped/inverted model as a student are the same as mine as a professor. There are classes in which this can be very effective, but it relies very strongly on the motivation, work ethic, and time management skills of the students involved.
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> Count your blessings. You never understand the material half as well as you think you do until you have to explain it to someone else.
I would love to have the option to develop that skill - e.g., voluntarily forming or joining study groups, or signing up as a tutor or teaching assistant. But in my case, I'm essentially required to teach slacking students to protect part of my grade. Thanks to the group structure, there is absolutely no recognition that some students are bailing out other students.
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Have you discussed this with the professor? I'm one. If a student told me what you're telling me, I would try to figure out some procedural change. Even if it's too late for you, you might help out the next group by speaking up.
Profs make mistakes, and changes have unintended consequences. I think we're going to see a lot of mistakes (as well as some revelations) over the next few years as people tinker with pedagogy.
You have to reevaluate your goals (Score:4, Insightful)
Like other pointed out, group learning and flipped classroom are two different things. But now to my point. You think, you could learn material just by consuming and memorizing them. This is often thought by students just out of high school, sometime even with older students. However, this is bullshit. Learning anything is not to memorize the stuff, but to understand it. One very effective method is to teach other people. Their questions, question your knowledge and your grasp of the topic. By that you have to think about it in different angles. In most cases you learn a lot from that process.
In your special university, the material to learn and the homework might only designed to test your ability to memorize the stuff. In that case, you might think that the extra work does not add up, but for any later work as a scientist or in industry, true understanding is necessary. In short a book cannot solve problems only an educated person can.
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> You think, you could learn material just by consuming and memorizing them. This is often thought by students just out of high school, sometime even with older students. However, this is bullshit.
I think I can handle independent study just fine. I passed two bar exams through study-at-home materials.
MY point is that one of the most important skills to be developed in academia - particularly at the undergraduate level - is the ability to learn independently of a classroom agenda. Being asked to spe
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Ah... bar exams. The "flipped classroom" is mostly buzz in science and engineering where there is a hell of a lot of mathematics and mechanics to be internalised. Independent study is inefficient, because there is a well-defined set of knowledge and skills to acquire, and non-experts (which students are, by definition) will be unable to identify the required steps to consolidate the learning. A problem set designed by a true expert can be used to consolidate and integrate knowledge, and to identify and diag
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If you want to stay in physics, you'd better get used to this. This is the way the real world of science works.
You've had some comments from academics, but from an industrial physicist, I can say that over 50% of my job is walking a co-worker through a problem I've already solved. This isn't useless at all, you'll need to be able to explain your work to people who aren't specialists in your area.
If you really feel some of the work you're doing is a waste of time, you need to be able to convince the profes
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I must be old (Score:2)
I much prefer just listening to a lecture in class, and then doing the work at home. Working in class is a pain.. and I certainly don't find much benefit in working with classmates usually.
We tried this... (Score:3)
And the problem was that a few lazy/slow students would end up stalling the entire class. So for example, if the material covered eigenvectors in linear algebra, and the student was supposed to know what they are and try the homework before the class. There were always a few bad apples that would come in, claim they couldn't understand any of the material, and force the instructor to walk them through the lecture again. And you couldn't just tell the students to RTFM.
So it basically became a case where the good students were hearing the same thing twice over, and couldn't get help with the tougher material (because the easy questions were taking a lot of time to cover). If the teacher skipped the easy problems, the lazy students would complain and whine.
In the typical scenario, all students heard the same material once (in class), and the lazy students would struggle with the homework (or mooch off the better students) while the good students would do well. In the end, it basically came down to the smart students helping the slower ones with the easy problems, so that the class could focus on the tough problems.
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Umm, why can't you just ignore the slow students? If they come to class unprepared, that's their problem.
Unfortunately, that has two problems:
1) Students in college are paying (a lot) of money. So there is a lot of scrutiny and expectations. I have even heard a student effectively say "I have paid a lot of money for this class, and I want to get my money's worth from the instructor". Nothing about how he should work hard to make sure his degree meant something - he effectively wanted to exchange money for knowledge. And there is no way of saying - "here is your refund, now get out"; the instructor can't kick
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Sheer arrogance. I'd say learning his place would be a very valuable lesson.
Arrogance (Score:2)
Only the arrogant idiot who thinks that he is smarter than the instructors believe that lectures are worthless. Or maybe I just went to a school where people actually took classes because they were challenging, not because they were easy A's. University is probably the only opportunity that most of us will have to try to glean some of the brilliance of the top researchers in their fields. Why would you want to throw away any minute of lecture?
Flipping the paradigm rubrics (Score:2)
...but on a computer! (Score:3)
In almost all of my university courses there was an expectation that the student would come to lecture having already read the relevant chapters of the textbook. Generally the professor did not rely on the students actually having done so, but this is essentially the same thing just using a different medium.
Atlantic and the Kaplan Test Prep (Score:3)
Atlantic's article has some big flaws. The issue with what you want out of a classroom depends on the criteria. If your goal is to charge as much as possible for students who will fail to obtain degrees, while increasing the size and salaries of administrations, then yes, having minimum wage adjuncts teaching everything and reducing tenured teachers is great.
If your goal is to have the maximum percentage of your students actually finish their degrees, then it's a very bad plan. And The Atlantic is hardly an objective party in this discussion. They have a vested interest in online, for-profit education replacing the model of universities as centers of academic excellence and research. It's basically the "school reform" argument transferred to higher education.
Think about the professors that had the greatest impact on you as a person and professionally. How many of them were tenured and how many were harried adjuncts teaching 8 courses per semester just to be able to afford to live?
The enormous growth in the cost of higher education has not been because professors are making too much money or because they've got too much job security.
I did my master's thesis on this stuff. (Score:2)
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The point is that this isn't really a win. It's just enforcing the best practices. What's more, for students that take less time this means getting short changed on lectures and for students that take longer to do the homework still don't have sufficient time to do so.
Also, test scores are a lousy way of measuring performance. Having students spending less time to master the material or mastering more material is a better place to focus.
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for students that take less time this means getting short changed on lectures
If you choose not to give your education priority while paying for college - that's your choice. You eat the result. If you don't take the time to do the reading and homework, you will not do as well - this is not different.
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Exactly! I just wish this method was available when I was in school -- it took me almost 2 years to treat my courses in this way; spelling it out in advance is definitely the way to go.
My favourite course I ever took made the lecture notes available the day before; the "lecture" time was mostly spent clarifying issues, after a quick skim through the slides at the start. People who didn't pre-read the notes in the first week either dropped out or caught on really quickly. The class resulted in the entire
Re:So.... (Score:4, Interesting)
With this material, most students don't need huge swaths of time to do the assignments if supervision is available. It's not appropriate for all levels of instruction or all subject matter, but when there are a lot of fundamental concepts that need to be grasped, the fact that you're no longer doing the work in isolation at home is the real source of the improvement. There's still a final assignment where the students have to prove themselves, in case you're worried of overdependent students.
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I'm TAing a "flipped" course like this starting next week; it's an intro to CS course for people with no CS background. Our lecture slots are purely homework help and Q there's little or no attempt at lecturing except in the first week. We also allocate tutorial sessions (an additional 2 hours per week) which are mandatory for the first couple of weeks and then optional; the point of them is to give students more opportunity to get help with homework.
With this material, most students don't need huge swaths of time to do the assignments if supervision is available. It's not appropriate for all levels of instruction or all subject matter, but when there are a lot of fundamental concepts that need to be grasped, the fact that you're no longer doing the work in isolation at home is the real source of the improvement. There's still a final assignment where the students have to prove themselves, in case you're worried of overdependent students.
I used to teach, and the method I used was "Here is what I told you I talked about from last weeks lecture, and here is today's lecture. And this is what I am going to talk about for the next lecture", ". Not always in that order, but it works. Three repetitions and the material is understood and learned. Home flipping is applying a similar principal.
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I used to teach, and the method I used was "Here is what I told you I talked about from last weeks lecture, and here is today's lecture. And this is what I am going to talk about for the next lecture", ". Not always in that order, but it works. Three repetitions and the material is understood and learned. Home flipping is applying a similar principal.
As a student, I also find this type of teaching most effective. It can be extremely difficult when a topic is discussed, isn't really understood, and then nobody has any time to discuss it again.
Its a win if lecture done specifically for video (Score:3)
The point is that this isn't really a win. It's just enforcing the best practices.
No it can be a win if done right, see below. I had two graduate level economics classes (micro and macro) that followed this model. The stock lectures were videotaped and made available for download. We watched them outside of class at our convenience and usually at 1.5x speed. If you are understanding the material 1.0x and 1.5x are effectively equivalent, if not there is rewind. Sometimes a tricky concept took a couple of rewinds.This was a win but not the biggest win.
These videos were not simply a reco
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The point is that this isn't really a win. It's just enforcing the best practices.
Quite. Students have always been told to do pre-lecture reading, but it's very rarely enforced. In fact, all my lecturers seemed to run on the assumption that we wouldn't, so lectures gave the information from the ground up, rather than starting where the reading left off.
Of course, that was on the science and engineering campus. A couple of miles away, the humanities students were in the library reading novels, essays and treatises that were due for discussion that week, and if they were behind on their re
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Spoken like somebody that doesn't know anything about education. Lectures aren't a stupid teaching method, they're a compromise between having individual tutors and having everybody learning out of a book. A good lecturer can inspire an entire classroom full of students to gain interest in the subject.
I know I struggled with math until I had a particularly talented lecturer in college. He had a long beard, wore a meter stick through his belt like a sword and was far more effective at communicating interest
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Lectures aren't a stupid teaching method
Yes they are.
they're a compromise between having individual tutors and having everybody learning out of a book.
Many people learn better out of the book, or online, but have to attend lectures anyway, because there might be a pop quiz or the lecturer might mention something not in the book that is on the final exam. If lecturers were required to teach the same material as the book, and use only pre-scheduled quizes and tests, then many people would have no use for them.
Re: So.... (Score:2)
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A lecture is a method for getting words from the teacher's page to the student's without passing through the brain of either.
Or so a lecturer told me.
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Issue is, time is finite. You're effectively doubling the time spend per each course, thats going to mean less time for other courses, and jobs needed to buy food and pay tuition.
Also issue is the time needed to prepare, classes would need to be staggered to allow at minimum the three (or however long is needed) hours between them. I highly doubt these results would be comparable if I did the preparation at 6am and had a class at 4pm with a full schedule between that.
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Besides, I suspect that the improved result is just due to the increased test practice: When the students get to the exam, they're already used to the questions from the lectures turned practice and have a better idea of the expected answers because of the feedback they get from the professor and teaching assistants. That does not prove that they have a better or deeper understanding of the material.
Testing consolidates retention of concepts. Practice consolidates testing of concepts. If your test practice does not improve retention of concepts, then you're a bad teacher, and a bad teacher will remain a bad teacher regardless of techniques employed.
Watch videos at 1.5x ... (Score:2)
Issue is, time is finite. You're effectively doubling the time spend per each course ...
No. I've had two graduate level economics classes (micro and macro) that used this format. My classmates and I soon learned that watching at 1.5x speed works really well if you are getting the material, less likely to get bored and nod off. If not getting a particular difficult concept, rewind, slow down, repeat as necessary - which is also an improvement offered by video.
Also issue is the time needed to prepare, classes would need to be staggered to allow at minimum the three (or however long is needed) hours between them.
No, my classmates and I generally watched the videos the night before the class.
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The general rule of thumb for lecture classes is you're intended to spend twice as much time on class material while outside of class as you spend in lecture. For lab courses it's an equal amount of time.
In this case, students are presumably still expected to spend time studying outside of class, so instead of:
3 hours in lecture + 6 hours of homework/studying
they're doing
3 hours watching out-of-class lectures + 3 hours of exercises in class + 3 hours of homework/studying
The total time commitment is not inc
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Re:Socratic (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, he's putting videos of the material for students up on Youtube - just like Socrates did.
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Re:Socratic (Score:5, Funny)
Hush, you fool! Do you want to corrupt our youth?!?!
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Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI [youtube.com]
"Eric Mazur: "I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly." Eri
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Customers are not Dentists (Score:2)
As the parent states - STUDY TIME IS REQUIRED. I've seen worthless busy work which misses the point...(but it pleases many of today's parents) although the students are not in the right perspective to objectively classify it and sadly, I'd say many parents as well.
Reality is that the old models WORK and are time tested. Most students don't put in the time, they'll game the system to do as little as possible - some even teach them how to game tests to maximize their scores (undermining the purpose but it d
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You mean they have to sing for their supper?