What questions should a teacher ask themselves to make the "inverted classroom" more effective? What is an inverted classroom and why this learning technology has become so popular. We tell you in our material.
Flipped learning is a new concept that helps to save students from passive and boring activities. So, lectures are viewed at home as a video, and in the classroom there is an active discussion of the material passed and a series of questions and answers with the teacher, if something was not clear.
Consider a typical scenario: the teacher spends 45 minutes of the scheduled hour on most of his lectures, thus saving 15 minutes for discussion. Noticing that the students 'attention is not preserved until the end of the class, he decides to try the "inverted class".
The teacher learns the latest techniques and tools and decides that he can give lectures to his students with videos that they can watch before class, for example, at home.
This way, you can save time for discussions, mentoring, teamwork, and other activities during an hour-long class session. The first thing that comes to mind for a teacher is to record 45-minute video lectures using tools such as Panopto, Camtasia, or iMovie.
What questions do teachers need to ask themselves to make the "inverted classroom" more effective?
First question
Why use video lectures? Why not just make a plan with important points on which the students themselves would be able to read the material in their own rhythm? In fact, the correct answer is: you need both.
Not all students perceive the material well through video, as well as not all – reading the text. The goal is to convey information in a variety of ways, where students can choose how best to interact with the material.
Here, the recommendations may look like this: the teacher can write in a friendly conversational style what they want to tell, and then use this document as a script to create a video. After that, you can publish both the text and the video for the students.
What time should the video be? Of course, a 45-minute video is too long. In the video format, the material is not perceived in the same way as in a live lecture. The video will not be able to interview students or conduct a survey. With the help of video, you can not look into the faces of students to see if they understand everything.
Studies of MOOC platforms such as edX show that the effectiveness of videos lasting more than 6 minutes drops sharply. Therefore, the teacher should keep this in mind and not make such a mistake by recording 45-minute videos. If 6 minutes is not enough, you can break the lecture into several semantic parts, for each of which you can make your own video.
What exactly should be in the video? Obviously, this will depend on the subject of the lecture. For example, if it's math, then a screen capture tool like Screencast-o-Matic would be effective.
One of the standard mistakes is when the teacher sets the camera on the board and writes down how he writes the equation. This format can be very difficult for viewers of such videos. It is also difficult to try to enter equation symbols using a normal keyboard. Therefore, it is important to choose the tools for your content type.
The usual conclusion of any teacher when moving to the "inverted class" – you need to do a very large amount of work. Here, economies of scale can help, where the initial investment of time will pay off in the future, when the same course can be run multiple times, with a small number of additions.
This may seem complicated, but you should analyze how much time the new format will save – for each lecture and the course as a whole.