Tom Brumm is the professor-in-charge of Engineering-LAS Online Learning. In this post, he talks about a different way of teaching coursework called flipping.
Good teaching can take many forms. There are many ways to promote student learning and not one method is appropriate nor effective for all situations. Let me share with you a method of teaching that I occasionally experienced in undergraduate education that perhaps wasn’t the best.
I was enrolled in one of my first in-depth engineering undergraduate courses. The professor would lecture three times a week for 50 minutes. All of us in the class studiously wrote down everything the instructor did on the board and struggled to keep up with how quickly the professor presented material. If there was time for questions, it was usually only a few minutes toward the end of a given class, and frankly, my head was spinning with so much new and detailed information that I wasn’t even sure what to ask, much less to have the courage to ask it. At the end of class, we were assigned homework, generally a lot of problems in the book, due at the beginning of the next class.
The evening before the next class period, I’d start on that homework. By about midnight, I got stuck on a few problems, unable to proceed because I didn’t understand the concept presented in class. The book was often just as cryptic as my notes. Amidst my frustration, I’d finish the homework as best I could and handed it in the next day. Often there was little time for questions about the homework at the beginning of class (there was a lot material to cover that class period). The whole cycle then repeated itself – lecture, note taking, assignment, frustration, submit, repeat. I passed the class, but I’m not sure how much I really learned.
Flipping the course is the opposite of the lecture model I just described.
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