communicating for
LEARNERS
SPRI N #2 G 2012
featured in this issue Inverted Classroom
Hot 5
Visionary Status
Book Review
Did You Know?
Learn from Your Colleagues
Inverted Classroom
1
Salman Kahn, founder of the Kahn Academy, sees video lectures as embodying the future of education. His not-forprofit company has produced more than 2700 videos on a variety of subjects from art history to math and at a variety of educational levels from kindergarten through college. The videos are watched by more than a million students a month around the world. To date, Kahn videos have not replaced lectures in college classrooms, although many individuals and institutions have shown an interest in what Kahn does. Articles in Time (11/16/11), The Chronicle of Higher Education (6/6/10), and Inside Higher Education (12/7/11) have profiled Kahn and discussed possible applications of his ideas to higher education. Moreover, his ideas are integral to what has been called the inverted classroom. While there is some dispute about who first coined the term “inverted classroom,” certainly an early use of the phrase can be found in an article by Lage, Platt, and Treglia, “Inverting the Classroom: A Gateway to Creating an Inclusive Learning Environment.” In the article, published in the Journal of Economics Education (2000), the authors discuss a pedagogical experiment they conducted in a microeconomics class at Miami University of Ohio. In which, they took activities that have traditionally taken place inside the classroom and placed them firmly outside. Elements of instruction in which their students were passive recipients (e.g., lectures) were done as homework at the student’s own pace, leaving time in class for active learning strategies that allowed students to analyze, apply, and otherwise engage with the material. Technology is at the heart of the inverted classroom. Lage, Platt, and Treglia used a variety of media to record their lectures, including videotapes and PowerPoint lectures with sound, and they made all the media available to students for home viewing. Jeremy Strayer at The Ohio State University used an intelligent tutoring system (a sophisticated version of computer-aided instruction) to replace lectures in his introductory statistics class. Recently, there has been a surge in the creation of apps that can transform a tablet computer into an electronic whiteboard. For example, “Explain Everything” ($2.99 for the i-Pad) allows an educator to do a demonstration using a stylus or finger to write on the i-Pad itself exactly as if it were a whiteboard, record the entire demonstration, then
post it for students to watch as many times as they need to. (A similar application for the tablet is “NotateIt” for about $32.00.) This technology is becoming more and more popular among mathematics teachers because it can change the dynamics of the classroom. A math instructor who used to have his or her back to students while working problems on the board, can now face students, write on the tablet (which is connected to a projector), record the explanation, then post the entire lesson for students to review at their own pace. The ability for students to listen actively without having to take copious notes on everything the instructor says encourages students to be active learners. This use of the technology could eventually lead the way to posting all the lectures and leaving class time for working through problems, answering questions, and one-on-one assistance. Although the death of the lecture has been widely discussed, the lecture may indeed be on the verge of a transmogrification. In a TED talk in 2009, Salman Kahn explained how he stumbled onto the idea of his academy. He was tutoring his cousins online, and decided to put a couple of his math lessons on YouTube. He received a number of complimentary posts as a result (including one from the mother of an autistic boy who was able to learn math concepts for the first time). But the biggest surprise was that Kahn’s cousins told him they liked him better on YouTube than in person. Once he got over the “backhanded nature” of that comment, Kahn says, he realized how important it was. His cousins liked him better because they could learn at their own pace, repeat materials as often as they needed, and take a break when they needed one. The idea of the inverted classroom is not without its drawbacks or detractors. Students don’t always take to active learning without resistance, many preferring to have instructors just tell them what they’re supposed to know. And instructors worry that students won’t watch the lectures if they aren’t required to be present for them in a classroom. And some instructors feel quite proprietary about their lecture material and don’t like the idea of making the fruit of their study and work so easily available. These are all important concerns and deserve to be a part of the discussion about the future of the lecture. Watch a video from Penn State entitled “Flipping the Classroom” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26pxh_qMppE