Flipping Higher Education

It’s only something I recently learned of, even though its been something educators have been doing for a little while now (I can be slow sometimes lol) but the revolution of flipping the classroom is here and gaining ground as a very powerful tool for teaching.  I would love to still be in the classroom just to try this out with my students as it has the potential to create such diverse opportunities for hands on learning in the classroom.  The presentation below by Jackie Gerstein on Slideshare is a great look at what flipping the classroom means for higher education.

 

Imagine what you could do in your classes, lectures or tutorials is students came to them prepared with new knowledge that they had gained whilst engaging with learning materials independently away from the face-to-face teaching.  It’s kind of done I guess now in blended learning approaches or completely online courses but if you had students watch the lectures in their own time and then met for ‘lectures’, you could use that time to have more discussions and answer more questions.  You could use the lecture to have debates and have students present on what they got out of the lecture video set.

Giving students the power to choose when and where they watch a lecture video, before their next class, means that they are more likely to engage with it and take it in as they will be purposeful (hopefully) and view it in a time when they are alert and able to digest the new information.  They can pause and stop the recording as well and break up their viewing of the video to allow themselves time to process the information.  That would be so valuable to many students.

I love this idea of flipping the classroom and would love to see it take off more in higher education settings, after all, higher education should cater for all types of adult learners and this is a model that would provide flexibility and autonomy for this very diverse pool of students.