Institute of the Future Fall 2020 Courses

Institute of the Future Fall 2020 Courses

by Jennyfer Peterson & Karen Shumway

Flipped classroom instruction was pioneered by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, after he realized that his nieces and nephews required tutoring to finish their homework because they lacked subject matter experts at home to help them when they got stuck attempting what instructors call independent practice. Why? Because the teacher assigning the homework is the subject matter expert, but they are generally not available at home. At the same time, they are spending precious contact hours with their students delivering lecture content that largely hasn’t changed in decades and often doesn’t require interaction between lecturer and student. So what if students watch and read content at home and do all the practice in the classroom? Thus the concept of the flipped classroom was born.

As a homeschooler, I’ve been teaching flipped classroom science courses for several years, assigning readings and video content through Google Classroom for my students to complete independently, while we do laboratory investigations together every week. When America was plunged into crisis schooling this spring, we became acutely aware that public schools are ill-equipped for distance learning, and weren’t necessarily doing a great job of providing engaging scientific discovery and investigation even before school buildings were shuttered. Last fall, I discovered there’s a huge appetite in this area for those investigations nights and weekends. So Jennyfer Peterson, another veteran homeschooler, instructor, and maker, brainstormed last month and the Institute of the Future was born.

Our vision is to take the talents and passions and tools of the Nova Labs makerspace community and use them to create the kinds of classes we wish we’d had as K-12 students, or wish our kids could get in a public school. But we don’t want them only available to homeschoolers. We want all of these classes to be available as a Livestream and recorded experience so that anyone can learn, any time.

Fall 2020 IoF Course Catalog https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZhspEYVlKNz8WjRJWQcU0lWZLvwJCgXkTVCPQc0v2iY/edit