On 29th April 2014, the University of Bath held the UK’s first conference on “flipping”. Flipping is the practice of taking the information content of a traditional lecture, and delivering it to students in some other way (e.g. video). This then frees the face-to-face time in class to allow the teacher to interact with students, and the students to interact with each other.

Flipping

Flipping in action (CC Ffion Atkinson on flickr.com)

This short conference brought together teachers who have flipped their own lectures, those like myself who encourage and support teachers in doing so, and those who are thinking about trying it. Often, as a learning technologist, I find myself at conferences where I am surrounded by people who are at one remove from the classroom, so it was great to be at a conference where the majority of participants were themselves actually teaching in higher education. The conference came out of Bath’s Flipping Project, which is a concerted effort to promote, support and enhance the practice of flipping at Bath.

The morning parallel workshops focused on three distinct areas: What is flipping? for the beginners, Flipping with learning technologies covering the means of delivery, and So what do you do in the lecture room?, which was the main question I had come with. This session turned out to be rather similar in structure to the “Flipping lectures” workshop I run at LSE with Kris Roger (see the end of this post for more details on that). The session was led by Dr. Helen King from Bath, who presented us with 3 common concerns that lecturers often have about flipping, and challenged us to come up with some answers. Some of the thoughts that emerged from my group and the wider room are below:

 If I provide the content ahead of time, they won’t come to class

  • As with any learning innovation, it is important to explain your learning theory to students, so they know why they are being asked to do this, and why they will benefit if they engage
  • Hold back some content, or information about exam etc., to be revealed in class
  • Emphasise that the class provides an opportunity for asking questions
  • Provide opportunities for the students to feed back on the teaching and to articulate what they need as learners
  • Provide clarity about what they should expect to get, and to do, when they come to class
  • Put assessment-relevant activities into the classroom – so what they do in class will directly help them get a better mark.
  • Introduce elements of gamification and competition, e.g. shotgun presentations on a prepared topic, with prizes on offer.

How do I know they are talking about the work and not gossiping?

  • One teacher uses a “Ball of destiny” – which he throws randomly to someone in the class, who then has to speak on the current topic (this sounds like rather intimidating behavior to me…)
  • Use a roving mic, and get groups to report back to the cohort on the topic at hand
  • Wander about the room, listen in to conversations, join in, ask questions

How do I know that they are learning?

  • The answer to this is another question: How do you know that they are learning now? When you’re lecturing, or in fact doing any kind of teaching, how do you know that they are learning? This is a much broader question than one about flipping.
  • Use online quizzes to track progress
  • Set and assess coursework
  • Use clickers in the classroom to gauge understanding

Helen noted here that one of the benefits of getting lecturers to engage with the idea of flipping, even if they don’t actually do it, is that it means lecturers are reflecting on their teaching and talking to each other, with the focus on what students are doing in class. That has very much been our experience with our flipping workshops at LSE, where we get a group of lecturers from different disciplines discussing their approaches to teaching. That in itself is valuable, even if only a small number of them actually go ahead and flip their lectures.

Some more general points that emerged from the workshop:

  • We need to prepare students for flipped content, by providing plenty of warning and preparation. When a whole module is flipped, run a trial run for one session in a previous module.
  • Flipping is not so different from the traditional model. We already expect students to do follow-up readings to complement their notes after a lecture. In the flipped model, they are doing that work before the lecture, instead of after it.
  • Doing a controlled study is difficult, because in order to be ethical you need to populate groups voluntarily, which may lead to uneven groups or to selection bias.

In the afternoon came the swap shop sessions where flipping case studies were presented. Two lecturers from Reading University, one in linguistics and the other in entrepreneurship, presented their results of flipping:

  • The entrepreneurship lecturer found a very slight decline in results overall after flipping, but noted that his EFL and dyslexic students were raised up to a similar level as other students. Meanwhile, the linguistics lecturer found a general improvement in results across all groups.
  • The attitudinal survey results from entrepreneurship students were improved right across the board, even in areas not associated with flipping.
  • The linguistics lecturer found that flipping proved popular with Chinese students. This surprised her, as she expected their previous educational experience would make them less comfortable with this approach.
  • The flipping was heralded well in advance (it started in week 5, but was heavily trailed from the outset).
  • Students valued seeing video of the lecturer; they much preferred this to audio-only as it made the content seem more personal. Also, the low-ish production values and absence of editing (no topping and tailing, all hesitations and mistakes left in) seem to create a more ‘human’ feeling to the video content.
  • Some students who did not engage at first were eventually won over by the sense that they were missing out on something in class. The linguistics lecturer said that she would behave in class as if everyone had done the pre-work – no allowances were made for those who had not done the work.

I followed this with a case study of an LSE course in Business Transformation and Project Management, where several lectures were flipped by providing students with a filmed interview with an expert practitioner from the “real world”, and then using the lesson time for a Q&A session with that same expert. These are baby steps compared with some other institutions that are flipping entire modules, but they do serve as case studies to encourage others.

I came away from this conference with the feeling that in terms of understanding the possibilities and pitfalls of this approach, we already know what we are doing at LSE. Now we just need some more lecturers to try it out! If you’re an LSE lecturer, and you want to give it a try, please get in touch with us at clt-support@lse.ac.uk, or express interest in our next workshop (LSE users only), which will be scheduled any day now.