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The Post-Lecture Classroom
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic reports on a study into reversing the typical lecture/homework educational method. The study had students watch lecture videos at home, then use class time to work on activities. After three years of trials, the researchers found both a student preference for the new method and a 5% increase in exam scores. 'In 2012, that flipped model looked like this: At home, before class, students watched brief lecture modules, which introduced them to the day's content. They also read a textbook — the same, introductory-level book as in 2011 — before they arrived. When they got to class, Mumper would begin by asking them "audience response" questions. He'd put a multiple-choice question about the previous night's lectures on a PowerPoint slide and ask all the students to respond via small, cheap clickers. He'd then look at their response, live, as they answered, and address any inconsistencies or incorrect beliefs revealed. Maybe 50 percent of the class got the wrong answer to one of these questions: This gave him an opportunity to lecture just enough so that students could understand what they got wrong. Then, the class would split up into pairs, and Mumper would ask them a question which required them to apply the previous night's content... The pairs would discuss an answer, then share their findings with the class. At the end of that section, Mumper would go over any points relevant to the question which he felt the class failed to bring up.'"
Back in the early 1990s, I had a high school math teacher who would assign the homework *before* she taught the lesson.
You were expected to read the chapter, try to do the homework, and then she'd answer any questions that you might have the next day in class.
You then had another night to correct whatever you needed before the homework was due. (and then start your reading for the next day's class).
It was 20+ years ago, but I seem to recall she'd hit us with quizzes as least once a week ... I just can't remember if they were at the beginning of the class, or the end. (and if they were at the beginning, were they on the reading from the night before, or two nights before?)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
That's basically the socratic method (still beloved in law schools). You go read the assignments, then come in and the teacher just asks the class questions / walks them through a case. When the class is confused or stupid (we all are sometimes) the teacher lectures on the finer points. Since the text is the primary lecturer, the teacher's role is just to know then law (best if they have their own opinions which are slightly skewed from the text's view) and to plan out a series of readings in the syllabus - not too much work.
/learn/ much in law school - that's what the barbri courses were for - to cram the law down your throat as hard and fast as possible. Law school mostly teaches how to think like a lawyer (break down a set of facts or statements into its component parts, look for inconsistencies, apply past conclusions of law to a present set of facts, etc).
Now.. the only problem is most lawyers I know (myself included) felt like we didn't actually
I wonder how this works for, say, history.
I don't know what the standard deviation of exam scores is, but a 5 percent improvement over 3 data points HARDLY seems statistically significant.
Uhm -- I guess if you look at education as putting in the least amount of effort possible to pass a class - sure - it doesn't do that. But then, that view of a 3 credit hour course /ignores/ the fact that you are supposed to actually do your homework and out of class reading - which is expected to take at least as much time as the time in class. So -- yeah -- your position confuses me.
In my experience, the only downside to "flipping" a classroom is parent backlash. With a flipped classroom, the kids watch 10-15 minute videos and, to the parents, this is the kid just spending more time in front of an idiot box and don't really interact with the parents.
With a normal classroom, you lecture in class and then give the kids problems to do at home. Even if the parent has no idea what they are doing and "helps" the kids by making mistakes, undermines your lesson, etc., they still feel like they are spending "quality" time with their kids. This anecdote persists even though studies show kids spend either almost zero time on the work to get to the fun stuff OR they spend twice as long trying to do it because their support system doesn't know either and has to teach themselves first.
The funny thing is, with attentive parents, this actually helps because the parents can watch the videos with the kids and, when a big project comes, they actually can help them at home because they learned the basics when the kid did or are able to go back and watch the pertinent lecture.
The point is that this isn't really a win. It's just enforcing the best practices. What's more, for students that take less time this means getting short changed on lectures and for students that take longer to do the homework still don't have sufficient time to do so.
Also, test scores are a lousy way of measuring performance. Having students spending less time to master the material or mastering more material is a better place to focus.
sure it's a 5% improvement. having one class that's fundamentally different than all the others is a memory aid. of course.
but honestly, if all of your courses -- I had 7 at a time -- had an hour lecture for me to watch at home, would you watch 7 hours of lecture videos on your own? with no ability to interupt and ask for a clarification?
this just totally removes any concept of humans teaching humans. now it's about students learning on their own, and being corrected by teachers. sure it'll work, that's how business management and supervision works. it requires dedicated devotion. it's not something that students have any interest in doing.
if you're not going to teach me, I was always able to learn on my own. I never needed you to supervise the learning process.
The key is, there's no reason to watch the video. Go to class and learn from the questions asked. What would be even more valuable is, instead of cramming 1 hour of lecture into each hour of class, take the first ten or fifteen minutes going over basics, and have the students discuss/ask/analyse what they have just been taught. Provide supplemental material for those who want to know more.
The most fatal flaw in most homework is that it assumes the student will understand the material sufficiently without someone to ask questions, and then expects them to turn it in for a grade following the push for completion without understanding.
One of my maths professors understood this, and would teach a subject, send us home with the homework, and start the next class day with the opportunity to ask questions about what was not understood. The actual homework was not due until two days later. Great method in comparison to what I have seen in most homework systems. I chose to take another maths class from him as a result of my positive experience in my first class with him.
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Issue is, time is finite. You're effectively doubling the time spend per each course, thats going to mean less time for other courses, and jobs needed to buy food and pay tuition.
Also issue is the time needed to prepare, classes would need to be staggered to allow at minimum the three (or however long is needed) hours between them. I highly doubt these results would be comparable if I did the preparation at 6am and had a class at 4pm with a full schedule between that.
Yeah, he's putting videos of the material for students up on Youtube - just like Socrates did.
Hush, you fool! Do you want to corrupt our youth?!?!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
It should be noted that studies have consistently shown that pretty much any change in methodology leads to higher marks the first time is tested, as students place extra effort on the face of an unknown teaching technique. The challenge is to produce gains that are lasting, once the students have gotten used to taking classes this way.
This is exactly how the case method used in many business schools (notably Harvard) works.
There is a case assigned for each class and students read/watch videos related to the class. They formulate a solution to the problem. In class the group discusses it or listens to a lecture from someone who actually worked in the company in the case or is involved directly with the issue.
Often the class arrives at a solution together which is very different from what they had thought before they came to the class.Some stick to their original opinion. etc.
This works great for problems in business or in engineering design where there is no single ideal solution. If you have to design a sailboat to race , you have multiple choices, catamaran, windsails, mutiple sails etc. If each student designs his/her own ideal boat and an actual boat designer who actually built a boat for racing tells you why this would/ would not work, it approximates on the job training.
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I'm currently three weeks into a Physics class that's modeled on this concept. Let me tell you what it's like.
In theory: Students review the lecture material on their own time. In class, the instructor presents some Physics problems on the topic. The students work through them together in teams and learn from each other, and the instructor reviews each team's work to help them get past sticking points.
In practice: I review the lecture material on my own time. My classmates do not. They show up largely unprepared, and when presented with a basic problem, simply stare at it until someone else explains the entire problem to them. Typically, that means that I end up teaching my classmates Physics, and then showing them how I solved each of the problems. I need to do that, because a significant part of my grade is based on the performance of my team - i.e., the average of individual quiz scores of the members of my team.
The instructor routinely harangues students to come to class prepared, and is assigning increasing amounts of busywork to be performed outside of class to ensure that work is being done.
So for me - a very reliable self-starter and independent studier - this class model means that in addition to learning all of the material on my own, I also have to (1) spend several hours in class teaching the material to my classmates, (2) have my grade dragged down by my team members' poor performance, and (3) have to complete additional work outside of class to prove that I'm keeping up. In other words, of the 10+ hours a week that this class is requiring, LESS THAN HALF is spent learning the material and honing skills; the rest (including the 4+ hours of class time) is simply wasted, thanks to this poorly implemented learning model.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
With this material, most students don't need huge swaths of time to do the assignments if supervision is available. It's not appropriate for all levels of instruction or all subject matter, but when there are a lot of fundamental concepts that need to be grasped, the fact that you're no longer doing the work in isolation at home is the real source of the improvement. There's still a final assignment where the students have to prove themselves, in case you're worried of overdependent students.
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we'll ask them to learn it on their own.
And . . .?
/effort/ to push above the rest.
That's basically just admitting the truth that teachers cannot teach anything beyond a basic level of knowledge. At some point in life - before college level courses - you have to either accept that you are responsible for your own education, or put up with a hap-hazard and shoddy education. Isn't that what defines the meritocratic system - you earn your place in life by putting in the time and
This may be a philosophical difference - but I have no problem _at_all_ telling a student that they are responsible for their own education.
Is that 5% increase additive or multiplicative?
I don't know, the dog ate my videotape.
The general rule of thumb for lecture classes is you're intended to spend twice as much time on class material while outside of class as you spend in lecture. For lab courses it's an equal amount of time.
In this case, students are presumably still expected to spend time studying outside of class, so instead of:
3 hours in lecture + 6 hours of homework/studying
they're doing
3 hours watching out-of-class lectures + 3 hours of exercises in class + 3 hours of homework/studying
The total time commitment is not increasing, the only difference is the tasks that time is allocated to.
The point is that this isn't really a win. It's just enforcing the best practices.
No it can be a win if done right, see below. I had two graduate level economics classes (micro and macro) that followed this model. The stock lectures were videotaped and made available for download. We watched them outside of class at our convenience and usually at 1.5x speed. If you are understanding the material 1.0x and 1.5x are effectively equivalent, if not there is rewind. Sometimes a tricky concept took a couple of rewinds.This was a win but not the biggest win.
These videos were not simply a recording of a past class lecture. The professors did a lecture specifically for the video and made sure any charts, graphs and writing on the whiteboard was recognizable on video. The videos had companion slideshows with key points, charts, etc and plenty of whitespace to take notes on if you printed them out.
The biggest win was having 100% of class time for questions, discussion and debate. Not just with the professor but between students as well. The professor instigating, steering and refereeing the debate at times.
When my various classmates and I talked amongst ourselves we recognized that we had some additional work to do outside of class, mitigated by 1.5x speed, but that we got so much more out of lectures we thought the new class format was an big improvement. YMMV. If the videos were simply a recording of a previous live class lecture the new format probably would have sucked. A purpose made video with accompanying material probably makes it work.
And the problem was that a few lazy/slow students would end up stalling the entire class. So for example, if the material covered eigenvectors in linear algebra, and the student was supposed to know what they are and try the homework before the class. There were always a few bad apples that would come in, claim they couldn't understand any of the material, and force the instructor to walk them through the lecture again. And you couldn't just tell the students to RTFM.
So it basically became a case where the good students were hearing the same thing twice over, and couldn't get help with the tougher material (because the easy questions were taking a lot of time to cover). If the teacher skipped the easy problems, the lazy students would complain and whine.
In the typical scenario, all students heard the same material once (in class), and the lazy students would struggle with the homework (or mooch off the better students) while the good students would do well. In the end, it basically came down to the smart students helping the slower ones with the easy problems, so that the class could focus on the tough problems.
Exactly! I just wish this method was available when I was in school -- it took me almost 2 years to treat my courses in this way; spelling it out in advance is definitely the way to go.
My favourite course I ever took made the lecture notes available the day before; the "lecture" time was mostly spent clarifying issues, after a quick skim through the slides at the start. People who didn't pre-read the notes in the first week either dropped out or caught on really quickly. The class resulted in the entire body of students having a solid grasp of the material by the end, PLUS a great reference set of slides, with added notes from class (which I still have to this day).
It also had the benefit that students sent the prof corrections to his notes prior to class, so any typos/logic errors etc. were discussed at the start, clarifying the bugs for everyone.
That's basically the socratic method (still beloved in law schools) ... I wonder how this works for, say, history.
It works well in business school too, at least for micro and macro economics and some strategy classes.
... Those were the sort of discussion I really loved.
As a computer science undergraduate who was also a history geek taking a history class every quarter for fun I would speculate that it would work well in history as well. The book and lectures can go into the facts and provide some background to the environment that events took place in. The lectures could focus on discussions as to why the various players made the decisions that they did, what influenced them,
In almost all of my university courses there was an expectation that the student would come to lecture having already read the relevant chapters of the textbook. Generally the professor did not rely on the students actually having done so, but this is essentially the same thing just using a different medium.
Atlantic's article has some big flaws. The issue with what you want out of a classroom depends on the criteria. If your goal is to charge as much as possible for students who will fail to obtain degrees, while increasing the size and salaries of administrations, then yes, having minimum wage adjuncts teaching everything and reducing tenured teachers is great.
If your goal is to have the maximum percentage of your students actually finish their degrees, then it's a very bad plan. And The Atlantic is hardly an objective party in this discussion. They have a vested interest in online, for-profit education replacing the model of universities as centers of academic excellence and research. It's basically the "school reform" argument transferred to higher education.
Think about the professors that had the greatest impact on you as a person and professionally. How many of them were tenured and how many were harried adjuncts teaching 8 courses per semester just to be able to afford to live?
The enormous growth in the cost of higher education has not been because professors are making too much money or because they've got too much job security.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Like other pointed out, group learning and flipped classroom are two different things. But now to my point. You think, you could learn material just by consuming and memorizing them. This is often thought by students just out of high school, sometime even with older students. However, this is bullshit. Learning anything is not to memorize the stuff, but to understand it. One very effective method is to teach other people. Their questions, question your knowledge and your grasp of the topic. By that you have to think about it in different angles. In most cases you learn a lot from that process.
In your special university, the material to learn and the homework might only designed to test your ability to memorize the stuff. In that case, you might think that the extra work does not add up, but for any later work as a scientist or in industry, true understanding is necessary. In short a book cannot solve problems only an educated person can.
I had a lecturer, last semester who did this. Put up 15 minute videos which no one watched. Not sure whether it worked out too well.