Author Archives: Robert Talbert

June 13, 2013, 8:00 am

Can instructors learn something from business about student pushback?

Have you ever tried out a new instructional method or course design – like peer instruction or the inverted classroom – and had not just a few students become discontent but entire groups of students who band together to push back? Or even put together a Facebook group to protest? It’s not pretty. Following last week’s Teaching and Learning Institute, where I talked with several college profs about this and other potential pitfalls of the flipped classroom, I happened to catch this answer on Quora to the question, How does a company handle an anti-marketing campaign like Dump Dropbox? and it seemed to me there are a lot of potential applications of this problem to the problem of mass student pushback.

To begin, the answer’s author says:

1. In public, ignore it.

2. Quietly shore up your messaging on any points where they landed a good punch.

Don’t bring up the…

June 10, 2013, 3:28 pm

A divide-and-conquer approach to planning a flipped class session

By Robert Talbert

I’m returning to the blog after an hiatus brought on by two things: the six-week calculus class I am finishing up right now, and my participation in the Appalachian College Association’s Teaching and Learning Institute at Ferrum College in Virginia last week. The latter was a week-long engagement during which I gave an opening night after-dinner speech, a two-hour plenary talk, and three iterations of an inverted classroom workshop for participants. Between keeping up with the calculus class and prepping for and then attending the TLI, I’ve had no time for anything else. But coming off the TLI, I’ve got a fresh appreciation for the importance of blogging in my professional life. So, back into the habit.

I learned at the TLI that there are a lot of faculty who are interested in the inverted/flipped classroom. Interested — but not yet engaged in doing it, for a variety of…

May 15, 2013, 6:53 am

Udacity to offer Master’s degree in Computer Science

By Robert Talbert

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity today announced that Udacity, Georgia Tech, and AT&T are teaming up to offer an online Master’s degree in Computer Science. Here is Thrun’s official announcement. The details are slim at this point but Thrun states that the course materials will be entirely free, that there will be a tuition charge if you want to have the actual credit-bearing Master’s degree certification, and non-credit certificates will be offered at “a much reduced price point”.

Without details, there’s not much to say at this point about all this, other than this is clearly a major advance in the reach of massively open online courses. Udacity was the first to partner with brick-and-mortar universities to offer academic credit for MOOCs, and just as others are beginning to follow suit, they have made the leap into graduate education.

What this means for traditional…

May 8, 2013, 8:00 am

Is the modified Moore method an instance of the flipped classroom?

By Robert Talbert

I was really fortunate this past weekend to host Dana Ernst and T.J. Hitchman, two colleagues (from Northern Arizona University and University of Northern Iowa, respectively) at the Michigan MAA section meeting. They did a discussion panel on Teaching to Improve Student Learning that I organized, and we ended talking a lot about inquiry-based learning, which both of these guys practice. After Dana blogged about the session, he got this tweet:

@danaernst would you consider modified Moore Method a flipped classroom? I would say there’s overlap in practice but different philosophy

— Brandon Dean Price(@BrandonDPrice) May 6, 2013

Dana, Brandon, and I exchanged some tweets after that, and I think generally we’re on the same page, but here’s my reasoning about this question and, more generally, what does or does not fall under the heading of “flipped classroom”.

The main thing to keep in mind is the distinction between an instructional practice and a course design principle. This was the gist of my post a…

May 7, 2013, 7:33 pm

Guest post at DeltaScape: Does this make sense?

By Robert Talbert

I lost a bet with my friend and colleague Dave Coffey (remember him?) over the NCAA mens’ basketball tournament, and as a result, I owed Dave a guest post on his blog DeltaScape. Risky move on his part, in my opinion, since his blog is a consistently excellent source of wisdom about math education and teacher training. I hope I didn’t mess it up too much — my guest post, entitled “Does this make sense?” is about so-called sense-making activities and what they mean for math instruction. It can be found here. Enjoy!

May 6, 2013, 8:00 am

Who does screencasting help the most?

By Robert Talbert

Let’s go back to the research paper on screencasting that I first blogged about here. In that post, we saw that students on the study generally watched the screencasts, even without explicit rewards like grades, and the tended to do so strategically. But what about student learning? Did it help?

To answer that question, we have to go back to a previous paper by the authors [PDF]. (That one is in the queue this week to read and blog about.) In that paper, the authors did find a positive correlation between screencast use (which they tracked using stats for the class’ course management system) and overall performance. But – this correlation does not imply causation, and indeed when the data are sliced along various demographic lines, sometimes the students’ performance was better explained by GPA than by screencast use.

I haven’t gotten into that second paper yet, but what …

April 25, 2013, 2:39 pm

Getting students involved with linear algebra through poster projects

By Robert Talbert

The semester just ended, and I’m now in full retrospect mode. This semester I was fortunate to have only one prep — two sections of Linear Algebra. Linear algebra, for me, is the cornerstone of a modern mathematics education precisely because its concepts and its mechanics lie at the heart of so much real-world stuff — from web search algorithms to scheduling problems to computer graphics and many other areas. And yet, in a typical one-semester course on linear algebra you only get to touch on a handful of applications, and those tend to be sort of domesticated. A few years ago, I decided I wanted students to explore more than just the stock examples in the textbook, and I wanted them to do so in an authentic way that reflects real-world mathematical practice.

About that time, Derek Bruff published this blog post about his use of Application Projects, and I gleefully…

April 22, 2013, 9:29 am

The flipped classroom is not about “throughput”

By Robert Talbert

The Washington Post reports this morning (apologies if this is behind a paywall) about how some universities are (finally?) moving from in-class lecture as the basis for their “large lecture” courses to the flipped or inverted classroom. Says the article:

Colleges are absorbing lessons from the online education boom, including the growth of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. And some professors are “flipping” their classrooms to provide more content to students online and less through standard lectures.

William E. “Brit” Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said the system hopes the redesigned courses save money and boost performance.

“The passive, large lecture method of instruction is dead,” Kirwan said. “It’s just that some institutions don’t know it yet. We do.”

This is nice to hear, but watch out for that phrase, “saves money…

April 4, 2013, 4:48 pm

Data on whether and how students watch screencasts

By Robert Talbert

Screencasting is an integral part of the inverted classroom movement, and you can find screencasting even among courses that aren’t truly flipped. Using cheap, accessible tools for making and sharing video to clear out time for more student-active work during class make screencasting very appealing. But does it work? Do screencasts actually help students learn?

We have lots of anecdotal evidence that suggests it does, but it turns out there are actually data as well that point in this direction. I’ve been reading an article by Katie Green, Tershia Pinder-Grover, and Joanna Mirecki Millunchick (of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan) from the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education in which they studied 262 students enrolled in an engineering survey course that was augmented with screencasts. Here’s the PDF. This paper is full of interesting…

March 27, 2013, 8:00 am

Inside the inverted transition-to-proofs class: What the students said

By Robert Talbert

In my series of posts on the flipped intro-to-proofs course, I’ve described the ins and outs of the design challenges of the course and how the course was run to address those challenges and the learning objectives. There’s really only one thing left to describe: How the course actually played out through the semester, and especially how the students responded.

I wasn’t sure how students in the course would respond to the inverted classroom structure. On the one hand, by setting the course up so that students were getting time and support on the hardest tasks in the course and optimizing the cognitive load outside of class, this was going to make a problematic course very doable for students. On the other hand, students might be so wed to the traditional classroom setup that no amount of logic was going to prevail, and it would end up like my inverted MATLAB class did where a