Today we have the fourth post in a series on building a flipped course by Natascha van der Zwan and Alexandre Afonso. Both are assistant professors at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University, the Netherlands. They can be reached by emailing Natascha at n.a.j.van.der[dot]zwan[at]
Online, Open and Collaborative?
So far, we have written about the general idea behind our flipped classroom, the online environment we designed for this course, and the offline workshops that we organized around our online modules. Throughout this project, we wanted to design a course that would be as open and transferable as possible. On the one hand, this meant creating content under a Creative Commons Share Alike license, so it could easily be shared online. We also wanted to involve our colleagues who know much more about certain specialized research methods than we do.
When we designed the course’s online component, we included a section in which our colleagues told our students about their own research projects: which methods they used, what they thought were the advantages or disadvantages of these methods, and what they wished they had known before doing their research. We initially wanted to ask our colleagues to write on a blog, but we didn’t want to increase what students had to read or watch, so we eventually settled on podcasts. Alex has now recorded a number of podcasts with some of our colleagues on a range of topics, such as the comparative approach in researching tax policy, doing interviews with EU and Commission officials, or social network analysis applied to fair trade networks.
Involving colleagues created a new problem for us. Interviewing a colleague on something like social network analysis is one thing. But if a student subsequently asked us to teach social network analysis, we would not have the relevant expertise. So when applying for additional funding for this project, we asked for and received money for colleagues to design modules for us in their areas of expertise. This meant that we could broaden the range of methods included in our course quite extensively, while reducing our own role in it – something we felt would contribute to the project’s continuity of we stopped teaching the course at some future point in time.
Then things got out of hand. Our faculty board was happy to oblige with our funding request on one condition: could we use the project to do research within our faculty on open and collaborative teaching? Fast forward to September 2017, when a research team of four frantically bombarded colleagues in the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs with e-mails and flyers to ask that they please, please participate in our survey on online and open educational resources. We are still analyzing the survey data but here are some insights that we can already share with you:
- A blend of online and offline is the preferred method among students for a course on research methods: interestingly, there is very little support for an exclusively online format.
- 92 percent of staff consider using open and online materials in their teaching, showing a high potential for these tools if the right infrastructure is made available.
- Staff often thought online materials saved time—they can be re-used, while lectures have to be delivered identically year after year.
Our last post in this series will discuss what students thought about the course.