I’m into week 4 of my Flipped Classroom experiment. This was the plan to understand how well students learn in a flipped classroom and how we can better use the time together on campus. I started this project with a few aims, these were to
– Explore the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning
– Improve the internal satisfaction survey scores of my class
– Improve the quality of work produced in the class
– Understand how students learn online
The class is a ten week filmmaking unit. Students must create a blog that contains weekly filmmaking tasks and a final film. It is a lot to ask in ten weeks, but my intention was to make better use of the time we have by providing lectures outside of class time so students would have some knowledge of filmmaking practices before they attend class.
The method I am using distributes a set of slides that contain video lectures, links to online sites, and other clips from YouTube and other sources. Additionally, the students have a worksheet that they can follow as notes and make notes on to bring to the class. Each week they are issued with the resources on the Sunday and they attend a two hour workshop on Wednesday, where they produce work, then a seminar on thursday where they talk about the lecture and review their work from the following day.
Studies have shown that students predominantly use mobile phones to access the internet, and as this is an internet based resource I wanted to provide complete access. The objective is to give students the flexibility of study. The University day is still very much 9-5, however, students have different needs, jobs and need to access coursework in alternative ways. Especially for a generation of digital natives who access knowledge through social networks and other online resources. i wanted to give students complete access to understand where they learn and how they learn, what is the interface to learning and where does it take place. Not necessarily physically, but where online, is it through the resources or the links in the resources, is it the type of learning, the links or does it make the students develop research skills? Another benefit of the resources is that they are online and are connected, how can I improve learning by connecting and networking my classroom to other knowledge networks and resources. This is a good place to start a discussion about OER, this can be discussed later.
The resources are produced in HTML 5, this allows me to distribute the content to any device as this code will work on mobile devices and desktop computers. To produce these I have to use a HTML 5 editor and create a series of slides with videos embedded from YouTube. The slides have a basic design but professional enough to be taken seriously.
I will provide other posts to discuss different aspects of these resources, such as production, quality and reception. So far there have been more problems than anticipated with the amount of time it takes to develop each resource and the shift in quality from classroom delivery to online delivery. The learning resources allow me to include film clips and links to websites all within the same narrative.
The project has provided some interesting research so far, with regard to reflecting on teaching and learning methods. The delivery through lectures is very different and there is no option to get the live response of a lecture environment. Additionally, there is a change in quality as videos are shot on takes and there are certain expectations about the resources. In a lecture it’s fine to read parts of the lecture but with video lectures this is more a problem.
Problems
– The time it takes to prepare resources
– The perceived quality of resources
– Problems with connecting the class