Tag Archives: Inverted classroom

May 1, 2012, 9:18 am

Building a six-week Calculus 2 course

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…

February 17, 2012, 11:40 am

When are students teaching themselves?

By Robert Talbert

Over the last 24 hours I have run into at least three situations where I’ve heard either peer instruction or the inverted classroom model as being pedagogical frameworks in which — according to others — “students teach themselves”. I don’t think this is accurate, and I’m trying to understand where this idea comes from.

Certainly in the inverted classroom model and in many instances of peer instruction, it’s simply not the case that “there is no lecture”. There can be a lot of lecture in either of these models. It’s just that the lectures are not given in class. They are broken up into rewindable, pause-able, digestible chunks and posted online where people can view them on their own schedules and according to their own listening practices. For my inverted MATLAB class, I recorded 41 screencasts’ worth of lectures, amounting to about 332 minutes of lecture, which is not very far off…

February 9, 2012, 8:48 pm

Starting off in SoTL

By Robert Talbert

Today I was excited to attend the startup meeting for a faculty learning community on the scholarship of teaching and learning (“SoTL”) here at GVSU. This group is sponsored and facilitated by our Faculty Teaching and Learning Center; it consists of the FTLC director and fellow faculty members from philosophy, history, computer science, and movement sciences. (And me.) Together over the next calendar year, we’re going to be working together to help each other develop research questions and projects in SoTL and serve as a sounding board for each others’ ideas.

I’ve been an end-user of SoTL for a long time and have done a lot of you might call “scholarship” in SoTL — for example all the writing and speaking I’ve done about the inverted classroom and clickers — but I’ve not done what I consider actual research in SoTL. One of the reasons I came to GVSU was to have the time, space, and …

February 6, 2012, 2:52 pm

Resistance to the inverted classroom can show up anywhere

By Robert Talbert

This past Saturday I was paired with one of our faculty from the College of Nursing to interview several prospective students for academic scholarships. In between interviews, we had a great conversation about the inverted classroom. It turns out that the College of Nursing is implementing an inverted model in some of their classes, although they don’t know it by that name and are not trying to jump on an educational bandwagon. They are taking some of their courses, putting the “theory” (as it was called) online as audio files accompanied by sets of notes, and then using the class time for practica, labs, and discussion. When I described what I’ve written about here on the inverted classroom, my colleague readily agreed it was the same idea.

This makes a lot of sense in the health sciences because as a practitioner, theory and raw information are important, but it’s the practice…

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 7, 2011, 7:30 am

Midweek recap, 9.7.2011

By Robert Talbert

From around the interwebs this past week:

John Cook shares Python code used to slice open a Menger sponge.
OxDE talks about antiparallelograms and asks some questions about tiling the plane with them.
360 asks the important questions, such as Why can’t people on Glee do math right? There’s more than one right answer to that question, I think.
Alasdair McAndrew takes a detailed look at alternatives to MATLAB, including Octave, Scilab, and Freemat. Sadly, his preferred alternative isn’t 100% OS X friendly, but that’s not his fault.
My GVSU colleague John Golden looks at different ways to annotate PDF’s using a Bamboo tablet.
On Slashdot, a report that Google is shuttering 10 of its projects. Most of these are marginal at best, with the notable exception of Google Notebooks, which does seem to get used by a nontrivial number of people.
Finally, at Mark Guzdial’s Computing…

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 …