Some of my students mentioned to me after I gave a public lecture earlier in the year that they’d never seen me lecture before! I am very proud of this and although a lecture can be a fun and lovely thing, I think my students benefit a lot from my alternative approach, flipped learning.
The other day I answered a call to provide a case study for a book on flipped learning by Robert Talbert and ended up writing loads. I understand that you are now marking the days on your calendar, waiting, waiting, waiting for this book to be published, longing for the moment that you can read about my flipped classroom! Don’t worry! I have empathy for you and I will here give you the full answers to all his questions so after you’ve read it, you can get on and live your lives after all…..
In seriousness, this post is a lightly edited version of a questionnaire that I answered on my longstanding flipped learning practice (with a few examples and some advice towards the end). If there’s anything you’d like to know more about, just hit me in the comments.
How I first started with flipped learning
To the best of my recollection, I first learned about flipped learning when I did a postgraduate certificate in Higher Education (my teaching qualification) in 2014/5. I was immediately intrigued because at the same time we had also been reading about how little students appear to learn from traditional lectures, which is how a lot of content is delivered in my department. I started making videos to supplement some lectures around that time and, since then, I have always used some additional video content and other elements of flipped learning. Doing this then freed up some lecture time for questions, activities and discussion, which I found more conducive to learning.
The pivot to online teaching during Covid lockdowns meant that my rudimentry video-making skills were suddenly really useful! My institution went quickly to delivering all content that had previously been lectures as asynchronous online recordings, with Zoom or Teams for seminars. My class was done slightly differently from the get-go because it was not my first flipped learning rodeo! I understood – because I had been dabbling in it – that it was better to intersperse shorter videos with activities rather than made one long video lecture per week. I had some basic video editing skills which I have developed over the years, so I think my videos were fairly fun and engaging on a technical level. This was honestly a bit of a creative outlet for me, and there’s also a pedaogigcal art behind how we make things engaging, why and when we try to make students laugh, and what that does to promote learning, which I really want to think more about. (Please please give me your suggested readings on this!) I also used the intimacy of the video format to produce the effect of an immediate relationship with the individual student-viewer, rather than trying to declaim to an imaginary lecture theatre.
Anyway, after lockdowns ended in 2021, I had the opportunity to propose and design a new module on the Politics of Nature, which I’ve written about a lot on this blog. My recent positive experiences of flipped classrooms meant that I built in flipped learning to the module design from the get-go. I did this both because I think that it is better for students to engage with content in their own time and at their own pace, in bite-sized chunks, and because this then freed up classroom time to do things like field trips and for more active learning. Having the opportunity to spend time outdoors in nature was obviously particularly relevant for a module like this.
How I organise the flipped module
I give students a range of activities each week to work through, with a clear indication of the amount of time they should consider devoting to each task. The most important/time-consuming tasks are the weekly reading (in common with all modules in the department), which is accompanied by a series of questions to guide reading and note-taking plus (and this is what is different about my class) a few short videos, varying in length from 5 to 30 mins. The longer videos include interview content with academics or authors. The shorter videos are just me as a talking head plus engaging visuals and supportive text on screen. The videos all introduce a key concept, idea or set of debates from the theme of the week and build on the readings and other materials. They are self-contained but link to other course materials. I write, edit and narrate them myself. I enjoy doing the editing and although it is sometimes a bit rough around the edges, the video are quite fun, as well as informative and educational, to watch, I think/hope! Here are some examples so you can make up your own mind on this point. The first one is absolutely filthy!
As well as reading and the videos, students also do some other short tasks, such as social annotation of a picture or short text or adding pictures and ideas to a Padlet board.
How I get the students to engage with the flipped content
The main incentive for students to complete any work for my class is enjoyment, intrinsic motivation and interest. I never assign any work that I don’t personally find interesting (even if it’s difficult). I try to make the videos interesting and funny – where the humour has a positive purpose in terms of learning – and the tasks for students stimulating and useful. I link all the materials clearly together to form a narrative thread. I hope that students choose to engage with them.
It is also difficult for students to engage fully in the classroom activities if they haven’t done the flipped learning in advance. I make sure that I am constantly referring to and asking students questions about all aspects of preparatory work including readings and video material, so that they feel accountable and to make it clear that they will learn more if they do engage.
Finally, it is very clear that one of the core and fundamental assessment criteria for the module overall is engagement with, and understanding of, the module materials over time, so students know that this work is required and that it’s better to engage in it steadily across the term rather than all in a rush at the end.
Of course, none of this means that all students do all the work all the time, but most students report working harder and more steadily in this module than they do in their other modules. (I have no way of knowing whether this is true!) It is also useful to consider the counterfactual: it may be that students would learn a lot more if they were the ideal, conscientious viewers, notetakers and active learners that I was not myself as an undergraduate, but that’s not the question. The question is whether they are learning more than they would from traditional lectures, and from my own reflection on their work, I think they definitely do.
What happens in classtime after the students have engaged with the flipped materials?
I have a little ritual, which I pre-warn students about, at the start of every class (including the field trips): I ask them what questions they have about the readings and online, flipped materials. If someone asks a really good question, I will allow the discussion quite a bit of space to breathe and allow it to take up some time. Sometimes we will have more structured activities to discuss the pre-class work, too, depending on the session.
Other than that, it depends a lot from week to week. The module runs for 10 weeks and for six of those weeks we are in a seminar room. These sessions are usually mainly discussion-based, with students doing most of the talking, but sometimes I will include a more structured activity based on the pre-class work (such as going over the social annotation task that students should have completed). We also go outside to do outdoor learning for 3 weeks. In one of these sessions students complete a kind of ‘queer ecology’ treasure hunt which gives us opportunity to go over key concepts. In the second, they learn about the colonial history of Kew Gardens in London and investigate how Kew tells a story about itself (as compared to the story about its complicity in colonialism that it could tell). In the third, we do some actual gardening – this is a week on the politics of hope and we engage in acts of hope in the future by planting bulbs, saving seeds and composting. We discuss the readings and ways of thinking about hope at the same time. In the other weeks where we go outside the classroom, we go to the UCL Art Museum and try to get to the bottom of ideas about time and modernity by looking at artworks. In and out of the seminar room, I try to make sure that I bring the discussion back to the online materials whenever relevant, by asking questions, testing understanding and getting students to make connections.
How do the flipped materials relate to assessment?
Students work throughout the term on a portfolio assessment. They have a lot of freedom about how they approach the assessment, within the assessment criteria (which are in principle negotiable), and they do a wide range of work from letters to newspapers, art gallery catalogues, their own podcasts, videos, photo essays, artworks and sculptures, blogposts, even a project to decolonise the family garden! They get formative feedback on their work from me and each other and they hand in what they consider their best work, with a self-assessment, at the end of term for summative assessment and feedback. The purpose of the assessment is to support students to develop steadily across the term according to the assessment criteria, which make it clear that engagement with, and understanding of, the module materials is a core part of what makes their work ‘good’ (or not). Students are asked to do a self-assessment (closely based on Susan Blum’s work) and they are encouraged to be honest about how much effort they have put into engaging with the module materials as part of the self-assessment and negotiated grading process.
Do the students like it?
Students have responded well to the flipped learning process. Here is a selection of their feedback from the most recent delivery of the module:
As you can see, the flipped content is popular: in fact, only marginally less popular than going out to a beautiful garden in class and more popular than learning in the UCL Art Museum! Students sometimes worry at the start of term about the amount of workload outside of class, although the answers above seem to suggest that overall the balance is right. I strongly encourage them to prioritise watching the videos and doing the reading, but also advise that it’s OK to find their own way through the module and prioritise what they find most interesting, if need be.
Students really hanker for more in-person class time (as well as flipped learning, not instead). I would like to put on more sessions for them, but this isn’t factored into my workload and my job is busy, so so far I haven’t done this. It is something I am considering for the future.
What are the benefits of flipped learning?
Students appreciate learning in their own time and at their own pace, having captioned video materials, being able to rewind and rewatch, the bite-sized videos that they can watch in little ‘dead’ blocks of time and the ability to work together outside of class time.
I think that students learn more from engaging in short blocks of materials rather than long lectures. It is more work for me than lecturing, but it is rewarding and fun.
We can maximise the amount of time we spend on active learning and activities during the precious time together that we do have. In my case, that includes outdoor learning and object-based learning.
I can fit in more content with the flipped classroom, as I am not constrained by the timetable. However, I need to be mindful of students’ workloads
If I interview an author or academic online, I can (with permission) use the video year after year, so generations of students benefit without having to call the person back to provide (often free) labour again and again. I can also use their ideas and the conversation in a range of videos and spread them out (like clips of talking heads in a documentary), rather than just having one long conversation or lecture that address lots of different concepts and ideas and leave students overwhelmed.
What are the difficulties or drawbacks?
It’s really time-consuming for me to develop the flipped materials. This is true in terms of the technical work of video editing, which can really expand to take up the time available especially if you’re like me and have a lot of fun with it. And also, I think – and this is a really good thing! – that I spend more time really thinking through how all the materials fit together across the term and crafting a holistic learning experience.
Once the original set-up was done, subsequent years have been less demanding because the video material and tasks can be re-used. However, you might imagine that I like the keep the materials current and refresh them from time to time, so I do invest time every year in this. However, I have some flexibility and if life gets very busy in other respects, then I can compromise on this and re-use the content, which is a nice backstop.
Another drawback is that students may not engage, but that is also true of traditional lectures or any other mode of content delivery.
A little piece of my soul dies every time a student tells me they watch any of my video materials speeded up. As I explain to them, I put a fair bit of work into timing and pacing and I believe that any attempt to mess with this will interfere with their learning. I can’t stop them doing this though!
Advice for anyone considering having a go at flipped learning
- Explain clearly to students why you are taking this approach and what the evidence base is
- Use bite-sized, short videos that are closely focused on a key idea, concept or debate
- Be very clear in your own mind what you want students to learn from each video or task and keep it tightly focused on that
- Make it fun, interesting and a good opportunity to learn, so students want to engage
- Make it clear how engagement will build towards assessment and feedback
- Use accessible videos with captions and lots of use of images and text to signal important information
- Clearly signal to students how long each video will be and how much time they should spend on tasks in advance (like this):
- It’s also nice to give students a little box to check off when they have completed each activity – both to help them keep track but also so they get a lovely dopamine hit for each one they do.
- Be mindful of how much time students have and do not overload them
- Think carefully about how all the online and in-person activities fit together and make the whole experience a coherent learning process
- Be aware that, especially without technical support, this is not an easy option….. It’s quite hard work and takes a lot of planning. The skills of video editing are not that hard to learn, but if you don’t have them, it takes a while to get the hang of it, too.
- I really think it’s all worth it, though!
I’d love to hear from you if you’ve done any flipped learning outside of the ’emergency pivot’ during Covid, what inspired you and how you go about it. If you feel inspired to have a try, do comment and let me know if you have any questions or feedback on my practice.