flipped classroom – Active Learning in Political Science ©

January 20, 2021

Incentivizing Engagement

A short note about a column in Inside Higher Ed about student engagement in flipped courses. Chandralekha Singh, physicist and director of the Science Education Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, reports that she and her colleagues interviewed thirty-seven science majors about remote instruction. These students said that they simply did not do ungraded in-class and out-of-class components of flipped courses. For example, they did not watch videos or complete self-assessment exercises on a weekly basis; instead, these tasks were completed, if at all, right before exams. Synchronous class meetings, in which the students were expected to discuss this work, became useless.

This parallels my own experience: if it’s not graded, students won’t do it. Anything that doesn’t explicitly affect the final course grade is perceived as useless busywork.

May 9, 2018May 8, 2018

Model Diplomacy: Smart, easy to use foreign policy simulations

Model Diplomacy is a series of free National Security Council simulations put out by the Council on Foreign Relations. Michelle used it in her class last year, and I decided based on her positive experience to try it in my intro to IR class this year. In this post I’m going to explain the basics of Model Diplomacy, discuss my experience using it, and give my recommendation. Spoiler Alert: I loved it.

Continue reading “Model Diplomacy: Smart, easy to use foreign policy simulations”

April 5, 2018April 5, 2018

The Not-So-Pop Quiz and Absent Students

More thoughts on the management of extremely small classes . . . especially those that convene at 8:00 a.m. Mine has only ten students, and recently attendance has sometimes been as low as 40 percent, which empirically demonstrates that a substantial portion of the class thinks regularly attending class is unimportant.

I am not one of those professors who penalizes students’ grades for non-attendance — my students are legal adults with their own lives and get to suffer the consequences of their decisions. I also don’t give many in-class exams. For the subjects that I teach, I believe that writing is a better assessment tool than tests composed of multiple choice questions.

I also believe that reading and writing before class, and discussion during class, are in and of themselves critical for learning. But, to borrow a phrase from Lenin, what is to be done?

Last night I remembered the physics exams I had as an undergraduate. Often students were allowed to bring along a single sheet of paper with notes written on it, to reference during the exam. The real purpose of the “crib sheet” was to get students to review their notes and identify for themselves the concepts and processes that were important for an understanding of physics. Also the act of writing and rewriting to make the most critical information fit on a single piece of paper helped strengthen memories of this information.

I decided to employ a similar method. This morning I announced that class on Tuesday of next week would include a quiz. I explained in detail the format of the quiz, its intent, and the fact that it would be an extremely low-stakes event — worth only 10 points out of an available total of 1,200 from all other assignments. I gave each student a blank 3 X 5 note card to write notes on; they can use the card during the quiz.

The downside is that I now have to create and grade a quiz. But even if the entire class decides to show up, I will still have only ten quizzes to grade. A reasonable trade-off, in my opinion.

I’ll report on how this goes next week.

March 19, 2018March 17, 2018

Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 5

Today we have the final post in a series on building a flipped course by Natascha van der Zwan and Alexandre Afonso, 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]fgga[dot]leidenuniv[dot]nl.

Our previous posts discussed why we wanted a blended learning approach to our research methods course, the design of the course’s online modules and offline workshops, and the involvement in colleagues. We have saved the best for last: what did students think of our redesigned course?

Because of the time and energy required by this project, we became very invested in it. We thought the flipped classroom was awesome. So when the course evaluations came back in, we were happy to read that students generally liked the flexibility that the new course design gave them, the look of the online environment, and research methods content. A few students even mentioned their appreciation for the academic skills modules — they had been struggling with certain skills like academic writing, but as graduate students they had felt too embarrassed to ask for help. Continue reading “Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 5”

March 12, 2018February 9, 2018

Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 4

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]fgga[dot]leidenuniv[dot]nl.

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.

March 5, 2018February 9, 2018

Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 3

Today we have the third 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]fgga[dot]leidenuniv[dot]nl.

Going Offline

In our two previous posts, we wrote about the general idea behind our flipped classroom in Research Methods and producing the content for our online modules. Today we will discuss the offline series of workshops in which students gain hands-on experience with the research methods or skills they studied online.

When you do a big blended learning project such as this one, it’s very easy to get carried away by the new and shiny part: your attention will go predominantly to the online content. This makes sense: the online component is often not only the novelty aspect of the course, but also the more time-consuming part to produce, and the one that will last. It’s very easy then to fall into the trap, as we did, of not paying enough attention to the more familiar offline part of the course.

When we applied for funding to set up the flipped classroom, our idea about the offline component was as follows:

Students will be stimulated to go back and forth between the theoretical material online and the concrete application of the methods in class. This course design will stimulate a much more experiential learning process than in a traditional research methods courses, as the course will assist the students in “learning by doing” research. The learning experience is also much more interactive than in a traditional course setting, as students are actively involved in each other’s research projects, jointly handling common challenges involved in doing research during the course seminars.

We were wrong. Our initial idea – to have students do the workshops, as they were writing their thesis – presumed that all students would at the same stage of the thesis project by the time they took our course. This was not the case: some had started but switched topics, others were already quite advanced and still others had not even started thinking about a thesis topic yet. In other words: the activities we envisioned them to do (e.g. carry out a qualitative interview with a respondent) simply bombed. We had to find a plan B. Continue reading “Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 3”

February 26, 2018February 9, 2018

Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 2

Today we have the second 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]fgga[dot]leidenuniv[dot]nl.

How to Build a Flipped Classroom

University teaching is not very different from the way Adam Smith or Max Weber taught a century or more ago. Aside from the inescapable PowerPoint, there is usually a lecturer standing in front of a group of students who take notes. The reason teaching stayed the same may be purely path dependent: departing from this format may go against administrative rules and habit. Developing new ways to teach requires an investment in resources in time and energy that always run scarce when the new semester looms. At Leiden University, we are lucky to have a great deal of institutional support and a clear commitment from the university for developing innovative forms of teaching.

And this meant . . . going to the film studio!

Leiden University wants to play a leading role in the development of open educational resources. There are several Leiden-originated massive open online courses (MOOCs) on Coursera, including a course on kidney transplants by the Leiden University Medical Center and our colleague Bernard Steunenberg’s MOOC on Politics and Policy in the European Union. Over the years, the university has developed quite an infrastructure to make these MOOCs, with several studios on campus to create instructional videos. Also Leiden’s Online Learning Lab employs professional videographers and instructional designers who specialize in online learning and in helping faculty members such as Alex and myself make the jump to online video content.

We had a list of demands that we wanted for our flipped classroom. These were, in no particular order: Continue reading “Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 2”

February 19, 2018February 9, 2018

Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 1

Today we have the first 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]fgga[dot]leidenuniv[dot]nl.

Since I have started teaching graduate courses on research methods, I have struggled with the way in which such courses are usually taught. Why do we still teach research methods from textbooks? Most academics will agree that you learn best how to do research by simply doing it, and the traditional lecture format, where students are rather passive, seems inappropriate to achieve this.

For this reason, my Leiden colleague Alexandre Afonso and I have spent the last two years developing a new way of teaching research methods to our students, transforming our existing course into a flipped classroom using blended learning. The flipped classroom was developed with the financial and material support of Leiden University’s ICTO program and the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. Alexandre and I will describe what our flipped classroom consists of, how we set it up, and our experiences teaching it. Continue reading “Flipping the Research Methods Classroom, Part 1”

December 25, 2017December 24, 2017

Begin: Fall 2017 Edition

Happy holidays, everyone. Today’s post is another look back at my fall semester, thinking about what to abandon, begin, and continue doing for the spring. I’ve got two ideas for “begin,” one very simple and much more complex.

First, I have begun entering the classroom with my mobile phone on, ringer silenced. I discovered during the incident a few months ago that it is highly inconvenient waiting for one’s phone to boot up when one wants to call campus police. Before this happened I left my phone in my office most of the time. Not anymore.

Second, my spring semester course on globalization promises to be radically different from anything I have done before. The class will be collecting data in the field about local food consumption as part of a community engagement project. The project will entail splitting students into teams to tackle different tasks, so they won’t be marching in lock step through the semester, all doing the exact same things at the exact same time. One can never predict how well this arrangement will work — there is a much higher potential for the wheels to come off the bus.

Another new aspect involves interacting with students in two other courses, in an arrangement I now refer to as a pod. My students will supply spatial data on where people get the food they eat to students taking a geographic information systems course. And my class will be interviewing students in a sculpture course about how their work allows them to understand the concepts of place and making — which relate to the globalization of production and consumption that my students will be learning about. I and the two other faculty members in the pod managed to get our courses scheduled into the same time blocks, a piece of logistical jiu jitsu that will facilitate a type of student-student interaction across classes that I have never formally encouraged before. Since this is all part of a much grander experiment, I will be posting regular updates about the pod next semester.

February 11, 2016July 13, 2016

Learning Lessons About Civic Engagement

This semester I have formally incorporated a civic engagement project into one of my courses — students have partnered with local business owners to learn about the production and consumption of global commodities. I am new to community partnerships, and I have already learned some useful lessons about communication, expectations, and pedagogical design:

Continue reading “Learning Lessons About Civic Engagement”