I’ve just finished up the spring semester, and with it the second iteration of the inverted classroom MATLAB course. With my upcoming move, it may be a while before I teach another course like this (although my experiments with targeted “flipping” went pretty well), so I am taking special care to unwind and document how things went both this year and last.
I asked the students in this year’s class about their impressions of the inverted classroom — how it’s worked for them, what could be improved, and so on. The responses fell into one of two camps: Students who were unsure of, or resistant to, the inverted classroom approach at first but eventually came to appreciate its use and get a lot out of the approach (that was about 3/4 of the class), and students who maybe still learned a lot in the class but never bought in to the inverted method. No matter what the group, one thing was a …
We’re in final exams week right now, and last night students in the MATLAB course took their exam. It included some essay questions asking for their favorite elements of the course and things that might be improved in the course. I loved what one of my students had to say about the assignment in the course he found to be the most interesting, so I’ve gotten permission from him to share it. The lab problem he’s referring to was to write a MATLAB program to implement the bisection method for polynomials.
It is really hard to decide which project I found most interesting; there are quite a few of them. If I had to choose just one though, I would probably have to say the lab set for April 6. I was having a really hard time getting the program to work, I spent a while tweaking it this way and that way. But when you’re making a program that does not work yet, there is this sort of golden…
A while back I wondered out loud whether it was possible to implement the inverted or “flipped” classroom in a targeted way. Can you invert the classroom for some portions of a course and keep it “normal” for others? Or does inverting the classroom have to be all-or-nothing if it is to work at all? After reading the comments on that piece, I began to think that the targeted approach could work if you handled it right. So I gave it a shot in my linear algebra class (that is coming to a close this week).
The grades in the class come primarily from in-class assessments and take-home assessments. The former are like regular tests and the latter are more like take-home tests with limited collaboration. We had online homework through WeBWorK but otherwise I assigned practice exercises from the book but …
On Wednesday, I gave a talk at Indiana University – Purdue Universty – Indianapolis (IUPUI, for short) to the teaching seminar for math graduate students on the inverted classroom. It was sort of a generalization of the talk I gave on the inverted linear algebra classroom back at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January. Carl Cowen was in attendance at that talk and invited me to make the 20-minute drive from my house to IUPUI to do something like it, and I was happy to oblige.
Since putting the talk up on Slideshare yesterday morning, it’s gotten over 200 views, 2 favorites, a handful of retweets/Facebook likes, and is currently being highlighted on Slideshare’s Education page. So I thought I would share it here as well. Enjoy and ask questions!
Between the Salman Khan TED talk I posted yesterday and several talks I saw at the ICTCM a couple of weeks ago, it seems like the inverted classroom idea is picking up some steam. I’m eager myself to do more with it. But I have to admit there are at least five questions that I have about this method, the answers to which I haven’t figured out yet.
1. How do you get students on board with this idea who are convinced that if the teacher isn’t lecturing, the teacher isn’t teaching? For that matter, how do you get ANYBODY on board who are similarly convinced?
Because not all students are convinced the inverted classroom approach is a good idea or that it even makes sense. Like I said before, the single biggest point of resistance to the inverted classroom in my experience is that vocal group of students who think that no lecture = no teaching. You have to convince that group that what’s…
Salman Khan, of the Khan Academy, sounds off on the potential of pre-recorded video lectures to change education in the video below. He calls it “flipping” the classroom, but around here we call it the inverted classroom.
I like especially that Salman made the point that the main effect of inverting the classroom is to humanize it. Rather than delivering a one-size-fits-all lecture, the lecture is put where it will be of the most use to the greatest number of students — namely, online and outside of class — leaving the teacher free to focus on individual students during class. This was the point I made in this article — that the purpose of technology ought to be to enhance rather than replace human relationships.
I hope somewhere that he, or somebody, spends a bit more time discussing exactly how the teachers in the one school district he mentions in the talk actually…
So I said in the first post in this series that I would start in with the workflow and tool set I use for making the different kinds of screencasts I do. But there’s a “square one” to the workflow that is common to all of these and needs to be discussed first: Planning. If you dive into any project without careful planning, you might end up with a roaring success — but more likely you will come up with nothing worth sharing. Screencasts, being a kind of project, are no different. Careful work on the front end greatly simplifies the work on the back end and improves the overall results.
The planning stage of a screencast for me has five distinct parts.
1. Settle on a small number of coherent main ideas to discuss. I set a limit on the length of all my screencasts at 10 minutes. This is…
Since I started to put serious amounts of time and effort into screencasting last summer, I’ve gotten a lot of requests to blog about how I go about making these things. Starting with this post, I’m going to do a multi-part series here about making screencasts — or at least how I make screencasts, which is a long way from perfect or canonical, but it’s what people asked for! I hope it’s useful for people who are interested in this kind of thing and need some pointers; and I hope too that those with more experience and better ideas than I have can share.
First, let’s start with a few FAQ’s.
Q:What is a screencast?
A: A screencast is a video of stuff that is happening on your computer screen. There is often, but not always, some kind of voiceover happening in…
The University of South Florida‘s mathematics department has begun a pilot project to redesign its lower-level mathematics courses, like College Algebra, around a large-scale infusion of technology. This “new way of teaching college math” (to use the article’s language) involves clickers, lecture capture, software-based practice tools, and online homework systems. It’s an ambitious attempt to “teach [students] how to teach themselves”, in the words of professor and project participant Fran Hopf.
It’s a pilot project, so it remains to be seen if this approach makes a difference in improving the pass rates for students in lower-level math courses like College Algebra, which have been at around 60…
Our semester is into its third full week, and most of my time (as you know from checking my Twitter or Facebook feed) is being spent, it seems, on making screencasts for the MATLAB class. I feel like I’ve learned a great deal from a year’s worth of reflection on the first run of the class last spring, and it’s showing in the materials I’m producing and the work the students are giving back.
The whole idea of the inverted classroom has gotten a lot of attention in between the current version of the course and the inaugural run — the time period I think of as the “MATLAB offseason” — through my blogging, conference talks, and everyday conversations at my work. One of my associate deans, off of whom I’ve bounced a number of ideas about this course, related a conversation he recently had with someone about what I’m doing.
Associate Dean: So, Talbert is using this thing called the inverted…
I am a mathematician and educator with interests in cryptology, computer science, and STEM education. I am affiliated with the Mathematics Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. The views here are my own and are not necessarily shared by GVSU.
The Chronicle Blog Network, a digital salon sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education, features leading bloggers from all corners of academe. Content is not edited, solicited, or necessarily endorsed by The Chronicle. More on the Network...
Follow Casting Out Nines through your favorite RSS reader: SUBSCRIBE