Tag Archives: Flipped classroom

June 13, 2012, 12:17 pm

Continuous learning instead of “lifelong learning”

This will probably be my last missive from the ASEE conference, since I’m going into my talk session in an hour and then heading directly to the airport. It’s been a good meeting, and it’s always good to rub shoulders with my engineering colleagues to see what they’re doing. As I blogged on Monday, engineers are doing some pretty great things in education.

One of the threads that has really resonated with me here is the necessity of lifelong learning in STEM education. I sort of dislike that term, “lifelong learning”, because I don’t feel like it conveys sufficient urgency. When you hear engineers talk about this, you get that urgency: The problems engineers face are increasing in complexity at an exponential pace, and as one plenary speaker put it, it’s essential to be able to add continuously to your skill set in order to be a practicing engineer. All the good grades in the world…

May 4, 2012, 4:00 pm

Peer instruction and Calculus 2

By Robert Talbert

Sorry for the boring title and lack of catchy image, but since my first post about the upcoming six-week Calculus 2 course, I’ve expended all my creativity getting the course put together and getting ready for Monday. In the earlier post I laid down some design ground rules for the course. Here, I’m going to say a little more in detail about what we’ll be doing.

It’s especially important on a highly compressed schedule like ours to use the class meetings themselves to jumpstart the assimilation process and then train students on how to carry that process forward as they go to work on the day’s material in the afternoon and evening. This is always an important goal of class meetings in any course — I’d go as far as to say that this is why we have class meetings at all. But when you cram a 14-week course into 6 weeks, it doesn’t take long for one incorrectly-assimilated concept to…

May 1, 2012, 9:18 am

Building a six-week Calculus 2 course

By Robert Talbert

I took a two-week blogging hiatus while final exams week, and the week before, played themselves out. Now that those fun two weeks are over, it’s time to start focusing on what’s next. Some of those things you’ll read about here on the blog, starting with the most immediate item: my spring Calculus 2 class that starts on Monday.

Terminology note: At GVSU and other Michigan schools, the semester that runs from January through April is called “Winter” semester. The period in between Winter and Fall is split into two six-week terms, the first being “Spring” (May-mid June) and the second “Summer” (mid June-July). It’s quite accurate to the climate here.

Anyway, my Calculus 2 class runs in that 6-week Spring term. If you know anything about Calculus 2, and you have a sense of just how long, or short, a 6-week period is, the first thing you’ll realize is that this is a lot of content…

January 30, 2012, 7:55 am

The Owner and the Renter in Education

By Robert Talbert

Since moving to west Michigan in July, my family and I have been living in an apartment while our house in Indiana ~~sells~~ sits on the market. This is the first time since 2001 that we’ve spent longer than six months in a rental property. Sunday morning, as we woke up to find that we’d been buried in snow overnight (as per usual in west Michigan), I realized that the home ownership habit runs pretty deep with me.

When I looked out the door and saw the image you see in the photo, I naturally grabbed the snow shovel, walked out the door, and started clearing off the walkway and the van. I got some curious looks from my neighbors, as if to say: What are you doing? We are paying rent not to have to do stuff like this. And it’s true: The apartment manager usually comes through shortly after a snowfall and clears off the walkways. Usually. But who knows? Maybe he won’t come today. And anyhow,…

October 21, 2011, 8:51 am

Article about the flipped MATLAB class

By Robert Talbert

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…

October 14, 2011, 7:30 am

The pedagogy of phlebotomy

By Robert Talbert

When we moved to Michigan from Indiana over the summer, my wife moved to a sort of “standby” status with her employer, a conglomerate of medical labs based in South Bend. They are considering opening up a new lab nearby, and if they do, my wife would not only work in the area in which she was trained — cytotechnology — but she would also be the general do-it-all lab worker for clients. To prepare my wife for her possible new duties, her employer is paying for her to take a class in phlebotomy this semester at a local college. That means she’s learning how to draw blood.

I joke with my students that if they think Calculus 2 is bad, then they should try taking a class that consists of sticking each other (and being stuck) with needles — literally, bloodletting — for 4 hours every week. But all jokes aside, there happens to be some pretty interesting pedagogy that takes place in my…

September 20, 2011, 8:00 am

Flipping the college classroom

By Robert Talbert

This Thursday (Sept 22) at 2:00 PM EDT, I’ll be giving a webinar for AMATYC called “Flipping the college classroom”. This is all about the flipped, or what I call the “inverted”, classroom — what it is, why it could be a better model for student learning, how it’s been implemented at the college level, and tools and strategies for flipping your own classroom. This is a subject near to my heart, as CO9′s readers know, and it’ll be fun to talk about it. It’ll be my first-ever webinar, and I think it’ll be an interesting experience, even as I pray for no massive tech screwups.

Although it’s an AMATYC event, registration is now open for the general public. Just click here and register yourself as a visitor.

September 14, 2011, 8:00 am

Midweek recap, 9.14.2011

By Robert Talbert

Happy Hump Day! Here are some items of interest from the past week:

ProfHacker gives some tech advice to the not-so-technically inclined. These are actually good for the more technophilic as well.
At the Computing Education Blog, some notes on an NPR article suggesting that not only are there no such thing as “learning styles”, attempting to tailor one’s instruction to a “learning style” might end up doing harm.
David Wees offers some thoughts about standardization, starting with traffic lights and ending with educational systems.
David also has a bunch of questions about the inverted/flipped classroom.
John Cook has an article about enumerating k x k magic squares.
Finally, Mike Croucher at Walking Randomly has a curious situation involving a particular integral in MATLAB and in Mathematica. This is sort of related to the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus issue we saw on…

May 31, 2011, 6:25 am

How I make screencasts: Lecture capture, part 2

By Robert Talbert

Now that school’s out, I’m going to pick up where I left off (two months ago!) in my series on how I make screencasts. So far I’ve made three posts in this series. In the first post we talked about what a screencast is, exactly, and why anybody would want to make one. In the second post, we saw how the elements of careful planning make screencasting a successful experience. And in the most recent post, we took a look at using Keynote (or PowerPoint) to create a lecture-capture screencast.

Before I talk about the other kinds of screencasts I make, I’m going to take this post to describe how I use my go-to tool for screencasting: Camtasia for Mac, specifically how I use it to make lecture capture videos when I’m not using Keynote. (Full disclosure: I was on the beta-testing team for Camtasia for Mac and got a free license for the software for my efforts. But I can definitely say that I’d …

May 25, 2011, 8:23 am

Thoughts on the culture of an inverted classroom

By Robert Talbert

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 …