Article about the flipped MATLAB class

As my only real contribution to the blog this week (I’m trying to amortize a stack of Calculus 2 exams before the weekend), I just wanted to announce that Mathworks News & Notes, the trade publication for Mathworks (developers of MATLAB), this quarter has an article about my flipped MATLAB class that I taught at Franklin College. You can download a PDF of the article at the website. That article has been about 9 months in the making. They did the photo shoot in April. (My students come off looking a lot better than I do, which is about right.)

The article does a nice job of explaining the context of the course, why I chose the inverted classroom format for it, and how things went on a day-to-day basis. I am very proud of the course and the work that students managed to do in it, and I’ll be thinking about — and trying to improve upon — that course for years to come. Longtime readers of this blog are very familiar with how things have gone with that course. But if you’re new, the article is a nice starting point to find out about my interest in the inverted classroom at the college level. Read that, then come back here and query “inverted classroom” to get a lot more.

The thing I like the most about CMP 150 is how it ended up not being confined just to one college and a fairly small group of students. To date, the screencasts that I made for the course have in some cases gotten over 2000 views from people all over the world, and I’ve been in contact with MATLAB users of all sorts — from researchers in Pakistan and Brazil, to high school teachers wanting to do a similar course in their schools, to 16-year olds trying to teach themselves to program in MATLAB. I think that’s one of the best features of a flipped classroom — once you flip and put the materials out there for others to use, others use them (surprise?) and I become a teacher to all comers, not just the ones who sign up for the course.