Free webinar on “The Flipped Classroom” coming soon!

Interested in the “flipped classroom” concept? Blended/hybrid learning? Maybe you would be, but don’t know much about it?

Check out this free webinar provided by Inside Higher Ed on Thursday, May 8, 2014, 1:00 PM CDT. I’ll be there!

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The Flipped Classroom

Thursday, May 8, 2014 1:00:00 PM CDT – 2:00:00 PM CDT

The idea of the “flipped classroom” has taken off in higher education in recent years – and it is used to describe a wide variety of teaching styles. What they have in common is that they largely replace the lecture. For material that might have been delivered in lecture format previously, online instruction is provided in advance of the class. This allows for time in class to be used in different ways – group work, discussion and other forms of highly engaged participatory learning become the norm. 
 
Discussion of the flipped classroom thus is a mix of teaching with technology – and teaching without technology. It’s about pedagogy, learning and the role of the instructor. And in an era in which educators and policy makers alike want to promote student learning and achievement (not just showing up in class), the flipped classroom has become a key strategy.
 
In this FREE WEBINAR, Inside Higher Ed editors Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman explore a range of ideas and opinions about the flipped classroom.

Read up before you participate! Visit www.insidehighered.com/booklets to download "The Flipped Classroom," a compilation of news articles and opinion essays, the latest in Inside Higher Ed's series of booklets on hot issues in higher education. 

Inside Higher Ed's "The Flipped Classroom" webinar is made possible with the support of Adobe. Your registration information will be shared with the company. 

Captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing provided by CaptionAccess.

Creating online lessons with limited tech savvy? Check this out!

OK, true believers, I know how many of you may feel about sales pitches, but this is (potentially) one that may be rather useful, especially if you’re considering flipping the classroom with online pre-class content lessons… but have limited tech experience and an aversion to wonky new programs. Here’s a possible solution that is easy to use for anyone who can use PowerPoint.

I’ve recently come across a pair of linked, free applications that can help you turn your PowerPoint into an online lesson. iSpring enables you to record voiceovers and embed quizzes into a PowerPoint and turn it into an interactive video lesson. Slideboom is a free service that enables you to upload and store lessons in the cloud for streaming and use by your students (including embed code that enables you to put the lessons in your course LMS like Moodle, website, whatever). Comfortable learning curve for tech newbies, and free (unless you want to “spring” for premium features, which may not be necessary).

Anyway, I just got this e-mail (below, after the videos) for a free webinar coming up later this month that introduces iSpring and demonstrates what it can do, and what you can do with it. Might be worth the time investment… I’m going to check it out. Deets below.

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Got the PowerPoint blahs? Find out how to power up your e-Learning!

We are glad to invite you to a Free Webinar especially for Educators. The seasoned sales leader Clay Moore, iSpring Director of Sales, will share a number of treasured tips:

• How to create interactive courses right in PowerPoint
• How to implement mLearning fast and easy
• How to protect the content, and more!

Choose the most convenient time for you:
Join the webinar → Tuesday, March 26th, at 11 AM CST
Join the webinar → Wednesday, March 27th, at 11 AM CST

Don’t miss this rare chance to ask an expert. There are just 2 weeks left to sign up.

Grab this opportunity! The number of attendees is limited.

If you have any questions feel free to contact Clay Moore,
iSpring Director of Sales, US & Canada
clay.moore@ispringsolutions.com
Direct: 877-463-0065

http://www.linkedin.com/in/claymoore67/

Free webinars this month! Just watch those sales pitches…

I’m a big fan of free. And while some webinars can be a waste of time or an empty sales pitch, others can be really valuable professional development opportunities. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

In that spirit, I pass along info from an e-mail I just received from MacMillan Higher Ed Publishing, a company that offers free webinars each month to college and university faculty. Many are demos of products, but some involve useful pedagogical stuff — such as the webinars this month on course redesign, adaptive quizzing, flipping the classroom, etc.

So, for your edification and amusement… professor, web-ucate thyself.  Click here to get to MacMillan’s Event Center to check out the schedule of March webinars.

They chatted… now what? “Evaluating online discussions”

I’m joining a couple of colleagues in piloting a few online courses this summer. Because interactive discussion is a big part of what most of us do, figuring out how to handle online discussions is an important challenge. But this challenge isn’t just for online-only teachers: many of my colleagues are experimenting with various “flipping the classroom” techniques, including blogging, chats, and forum discussions outside the classroom.

Figuring out how to evaluate class participation can be tricky enough… how should we handle assessing an online conversation?

Maryellen Weimer from The Teaching Professor reports some results from a recent study that examined a number of rubrics used by online teachers, looking for major patterns. Here’s a few thoughts, then, on possible criteria for assessing these discussions.

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Evaluating Online Discussions

Written by: Maryellen Weimer, Ph.D.
Published On: March 8, 2014

Discussions in class and online are not the same. When a comment is keyed in, more time can be involved in deciding what will be said. Online comments have more permanence. They can be read more than once and responded to more specifically. Online commentary isn’t delivered orally and evokes fewer of the fears associated with speaking in public. These features begin the list of what makes online discussions different. These different features also have implications for how online exchanges are assessed. What evaluation criteria are appropriate?

Two researchers offer data helpful in answering the assessment question. They decided to take a look at a collection of rubrics being used to assess online discussions. They analyzed 50 rubrics they found online by using various search engines and keywords. All the rubrics in this sample were developed to assess online discussions in higher education, and they did so with 153 different performance criteria. Based on a keyword analysis, the researchers grouped this collection into four major categories. Each is briefly discussed here.

Flip the course… flip the student? Part 3

"Feel the confident self-efficacy flow through you, you will"

So, loyal readers, if you’ve gotten this far in Robert Talbert’s blog series in “Casting Out Nines” about his flipped calculus class, you’ve got a sense of his larger motivation — he wants his students to not just learn math, but to develop as independent learners — as well as the theoretical commitments of “self-regulated learning” (SRL) that informs his pedagogy. Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect a novice in any new area of inquiry to figure out everything on her own outside of class without assistance. We teachers are still necessary, after all.

Talbert’s approach to scaffolding self-regulated learning, the notion of “Guided Practice,” is a recurrent concept in the literature on SRL. While the burden for deploying the learned content shifts from teacher to student, the teacher provides guidance in the form of objectives and suggested alternative approaches that enable the student to take primary ownership of the learning without losing direction (and therefore confidence and a sense of self-efficiacy).

Talbert also considers the tricky matter of assessment: how can we know if students are becoming more self-regulated learners as a result of flipped class pedagogy?

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The inverted calculus course: Using Guided Practice to build self-regulation

March 4, 2014, 2:59 pm

By Robert Talbert

This post continues the series of posts about the inverted/flipped calculus class that I taught in the Fall. In the previous post, I described the theoretical framework for the design of this course: self-regulated learning, as formulated by Paul Pintrich. In this post, I want to get into some of the design detail of how we (myself, and my colleague Marcia Frobish who also taught a flipped section of calculus) tried to build self-regulated learning into the course structure itself.

We said last time that self-regulated learning is marked by four distinct kinds of behavior:

1. Self-regulating learners are an active participants in the learning process.
2. Self-regulating learners can, and do, monitor and control aspects of their cognition, motivation, and learning behaviors.
3. Self-regulating learners have criteria against which they can judge whether their current learning status is sufficient or whether more learning needs to take place. (And then they take initiative to close the gap, if it exists, because of #2.)
4. Self-regulating learners select learning activities to serve as mediators between their learning goals and their own personal environment and circumstances.

This is really the vision that I have for each one of my students – that they would eventually become this kind of learner, and that when they take a class with me, the class moves them incrementally toward being a self-regulated learner. In fact I’ve come to believe that the end goal of all of higher education is to produce self-regulating learners.

I also said last time that the inverted/flipped classroom is an ideal setting for working on self-regulated learning behaviors because of its emphasis on independent acquisition of new content prior to class. While I think the real magic of the flipped classroom takes place in class, when students are working together on difficult problem solving tasks, it’s in the pre-class phase of the flipped design that the best chance for developing self-regulation happens. So one of the main design goals of the course was to build a recurring form of pre-class activity that not only leads students through new content but also explicitly builds basic skills pertaining to self-regulated learning. That role was filled by what I call Guided Practice.

Flip the course… flip the student? Part 2

OK, so in the first post on this thread Robert Talbert of Grand Valley State University described the rationale behind flipping his calculus classroom: responding to the paradoxical situation in which students who are capable of learning independently (with guidance) have been convinced that they can’t without significant top-down intrusion by teachers.   Paul Pintrich’s theory of “self-regulated learning,” discussed by Robert Talbert in this second piece of his series in the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s “Casting Out Nines” blog (did you see part 1?) — is one I find exciting, and hope to pursue further.

It reminds me of my thin experience with Marcia Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship, a framework of personal development through which maturing students move from having others drive their self-definition to becoming active agents in defining their own lives.

Self-authorship is a much bigger concept than  self-regulated learning, but it seems reasonable to recognize how helping students develop the latter can help them on the longer, more complex journey toward the former. What the two concepts have in common is enabling students to exercise more independent agency. Of course, this is often a scary proposition for our students, which means we need to scaffold it for them. Here’s where Talbert’s discussion of self-regulation through “Guided Practice” comes in. Enjoy!

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The inverted calculus course and self-regulated learning

March 3, 2014, 9:00 am

By Robert Talbert

A few weeks ago I began a series to review the Calculus course that Marcia Frobish and I taught using the inverted/flipped class design, back in the Fall. I want to pick up the thread here about the unifying principle behind the course, which is the concept of self-regulated learning.

Self-regulated learning is what it sounds like: Learning that is initiated, managed, and assessed by the learners themselves. An instructor can play a role in this process, so it’s not the same thing as teaching yourself a subject (although all successful autodidacts are self-regulating learners), but it refers to how the individual learner approaches learning tasks.

For example, take someone learning about optimization problems in calculus. Four things describe how a self-regulating learner approaches this topic.

Who doesn’t love free? Of course, sometimes you get what you pay for, but other times you can score big! It’s often that way with free faculty development webinars.

MacMillan Higher Education just announced an “EdTech Week” series of free webinars next week (March 10 to 14, 2014) on a variety of subjects, including:

• “Incorporating Technology: A Beginner’s Guide” (Monday, March 10, 2:00 PM CST, 30 minutes)
• “Thinking About Student Reading” (Tuesday, March 11, 11:00 AM CST, 30 minutes)
• “The Role of Technology in Course Redesign” (Wednesday, March 12, 11:00 AM CST, 30 minutes)
• “Flipping the Classroom” (Friday, March 14, 12:00 PM CST, 30 minutes)
• …and a few others.

Some of these may involve product sales pitches, but the larger ideas might be useful! Get the info here.

Reflection and the Flipped Classroom: More Tips

As promised yesterday, here’s some more tips on incorporating reflection into an active flipped classroom. The author is Barbi Honeycutt, the founder FLIP IT, a consulting firm specializing in active learning pedagogy.  In this post from her website, she provides three really useful tips for moving students from activity to focused, reflective thought.

I’m going to try the “10 Hands” tip next week sometime, and see how it flies. Should be good and (productively) uncomfortable…

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The Flipped Classroom: Integrating Moments of Reflection Follow Up

My colleague and I just wrote an article for Faculty Focus titled The Flipped Classroom: Integrating Moments of Reflection.  As someone who practices what I teach, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on this article and offer a few more strategies for integrating reflection into the flipped classroom.

I just finished reading the bestselling book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. As an introvert and a reflective person in general, I often struggle with the active learning classroom when I am a participant.  I need quiet time. I like to think about something before I share it with others. I prefer to wrestle with an idea in my own head and toss around different possibilities and scenarios.

But I know that I also learn by doing (I’ve certainly been learning more about running a business by actually running a business rather than just reflecting on it!).  And, as one of my students said in a workshop last week, it’s all about balance.  It’s about creating a balanced learning environment that includes both action and reflection.  We can’t spend too much time reflecting, or we’ll never get anything done. And if we only take action, we’ll never stop and think about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

So what does this mean for our students in the flipped class?

Flip the course… flip the student? Part 1

When I first got into course flipping with blended learning pedagogy, I was certainly interested in doing more with higher-order activity on Bloom’s taxonomy in the classroom — if student knowledge of content was engaged pre-class, then we could devote our time together to practice in application and critical analysis exercises.

But this stuff can go philosophically deeper, to more fundamental learning outcomes for students that can transfer beyond my discipline to student learning practices in other courses.  Robert Talbert, a mathematician at Grand Valley State University, has been discussing his experiment in flipping his calculus class in the “Casting Out Nines” blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education. His motivation is one that most of us have been pained to experience: otherwise smart kids who can learn new things and make independent decisions choose not to — because they are convinced they can’t. Especially at earlier developmental levels, our students prefer to be spoon-fed because they perceive that it’s easier… and they further perceive (erroneously) that they aren’t learning if they struggle through something that is difficult.

Talbert doesn’t want his students to give in to that misconception — and has redesigned his class to advance the larger mission of developing his students as “self-regulated learners.”

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The inverted calculus course: Overture

January 27, 2014, 7:55 am

By Robert Talbert

As many Casting Out Nines readers know, last semester I undertook to rethink the freshman calculus 1 course here at my institution by converting it to an inverted or “flipped” class model. It’s been two months since the end of that semester, and this blog post is the first in a (lengthy)  series that I’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks that lays out how the course was designed, what happened, and how it all turned out.

Let me begin this series with a story about why I even bother with the flipped classroom.

The student in my programming class looked me straight in the eye and said, “I need you to lecture to me.” She said, “I can’t do the work unless someone tells me how to get started and then shows me how, step by step.” I took a moment to listen and think. “Do you mean that you find the work hard and it’s easier if someone tells you how to start and then what to do?” I replied. “Or do you mean you just can’t do anything unless someone shows you?” “I mean I can’t learn without someone showing me,” she said.

What a failure – not of the student, but of the way we “educate” students.

Reflection, Introverts, and the Flipped Classroom (Faculty Focus)

I have become a big believer in the “flipped classroom,” and am working toward incorporating this pedagogy into my classes as time and energy allow. So I found this article by Honeycutt and Warren in Faculty Focus (and a follow-up I will reblog soon) valuable. The key questions: Does a flipped classroom favor certain student personality types while disadvantaging others? And how can we make the flipped classroom more valuable for all students as a learning opportunity?

Read the teaser below, and then follow the link for the full (brief, but neat) piece.

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February 17, 2014

The Flipped Classroom: Tips for Integrating Moments of Reflection

By: Barbi Honeycutt, PhD and Sarah Egan Warren in Instructional Design“Students in inverted classrooms need to have more space to reflect on their learning activities so that they can make necessary connections to course content” (Strayer, 2012).

If you were to observe a flipped classroom, what do you think would it look like? Maybe students are working in groups. Maybe each group is working on a different problem. Maybe the instructor is walking around the room talking with each group and checking on the students’ progress. And each group of students is probably asking a different question each time the instructor walks by. It’s probably noisy since everyone is talking to each other or engaged in a task. And students are probably standing up or leaning in towards one another to hear their group members talk about the next task. Students might be writing in a workbook, typing on their laptops, or watching a video on the screen of some new technological device.

The flipped classroom is a busy, collaborative, and social place. We could say it’s a place where extroversion, collaboration, and teamwork are highly valued.

But what does this mean for students who don’t excel in this collaborative space? What does it mean if we’re always focused on the doing?

In the flipped classroom, the instructor’s challenge is to design learning experiences that engage students in higher level thinking and problem solving during the class time. It’s about creating, evaluating, synthesizing, and analyzing together.

But, are we missing a whole segment of our student population and minimizing the importance of reflective engagement in favor of active engagement by only defining the flip in terms of collaborative learning?

Read the rest of this article at Faculty Focus here!