This is the introductory page to the Flipped Chemistry (right now, General Chemistry) materials. You can learn about how I flip and about the available materials below. All of the materials are free of charge. If you are teaching professional and want a password to the worksheets page, please email me at John<no space>Osterhout<at>John<no space>Osterhout<dot>com. I want to verify that you are a teaching professional. It will help if you send me a link to your university web page.
If you have a password, you can go to the Worksheets Page now.
Materials
I have worksheets and associated SmartWork homework for two semesters of General Chemistry. I retired from Angelo State University in August of 2018 so the worksheets were last updated while I was teaching: Fall of 2017 for GenChem I and Spring of 2018 for GenChem II. I am going to maintain the worksheets for a while so please bring errors to my attention and I’ll fix them as soon as I can.
How I Flip
My approach to the “flipped” classroom is use reading assignments and online homework to introduce material to the students and then follow that with quizzes and worksheets in the classroom. I find that students won’t utilize lecture-like videos but will sometimes use shorter, more topical videos. (See my posts: The Flipped Classroom: To Video or Not To Video and The Flipped Classroom: What Students Do To Help Themselves.) If you already have your own videos, then by all means make them available to your students. We can have a nice conversation over a beer about how effective this is.
Example
I teach General Chemistry MWF. Our university uses Blackboard, the textbook adopted by the department for General Chemistry is “Chemistry Fourth Edition” by Gilbert, Kirss Foster and Davies (Norton), and the online homework is SmartWork from Norton. Here is an outline of how I run the classes:
- Monday 11:00 am. The assignments sheet appears on Blackboard. The assignments sheet is just the front part of the worksheet. It contains the reading assignments, the learning objectives, links to videos if I can find and vet them, and perhaps some focus information. Here is an example of an Assignment Sheet for GenChem II, Worksheet 25, pH of Salts and the Common Ion Effect. At the same time, the online homework opens in SmartWork, see the example for Homework 25. The example is a screen shot of the problems I picked for the day. The first two problems review the previous day’s material and the last three cover the material for the next day.
- Wednesday 2:00 am. The online homework is due. I find that I get no complaints about the homework closing too early if I set it at 2:00 am. If I set it at midnight there is a firestorm of complaint. Another professor sets the time to 7:00 am for an 8:00 am class. This seems to work as well.
- Wednesday in class. I give the students a hard copy of the worksheet. Here is Worksheet 25. The students work in groups of four. They take a quiz that has 5-10 problems. The quizzes are worth 10% of the final grade. I try to make the quizzes correspond exactly to the learning objectives, which are clearly listed on the assignment sheet. The learning objectives are also covered by the homework, although the learning objective/homework problem correspondence is not perfect. The quizzes also contain questions from the previous day’s worksheet. When all the students finish the quiz, we pass them around and grade them in class. While they work on the worksheets, I go to each table, see what they missed on the quiz, and discuss as needed. I spend the rest of the time in the classroom answering questions and explaining things at the tables.
- Wednesday worksheets. After the quiz, the students start their worksheets. They must turn them in completed at the beginning of the next class. Worksheet completion is worth 5% of the total grade.
- Wednesday 11:00 am. The worksheet key (Worksheet 25 Key) posts on Blackboard, the next online homework opens in SmartWork, the assignments post on Blackboard, and we go again.
- Repeat until the end of the semester.
The Worksheets
Each file on the worksheets page is a zipped folder that contains: LibreOffice (.odt) and PDF files of the assignments, worksheet, and worksheet key. The folder will sometimes contain a graphics folder which contains Inkscape (vector graphics), GIMP (raster or bitmapped graphics), and the .png files that are used in the worksheets. (I use a lot of molecules from Wikipedia.) Sometimes there will be a WXMaxima (.wxm) file that contains the calculations. WXMaxima is a sophisticated mathematics program that I’m using as a fancy calculator. This allows me to save my calculations and redo them if I find typos later. (There is nothing like having 60 students pour over the worksheet and point out all the mistakes. If there is something wrong in a calculation, the best students in the class will find it!)
The Software
If you just want to use the worksheets, then you don’t need any software at all. Just use the prepared PDF files and away you go. If you want to customize the worksheets then you will need the ability to edit the LibreOffice .odt (open document text) files. The best way to edit the materials is to use LibreOffice, which you can download for your system for free. The newest versions of MS Word are alleged to open the .odt files, but some of my colleagues have had trouble depending upon the age of the MS Word. (You will also have formatting fits). Get Libre Office. It’s free. It works. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It gets updated for free. What’s not to like?
If you want to muck about with the figures, then you’ll need Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, for which you can pay big bucks. OR – you can use Inkscape (vector graphics) and the GIMP (bitmapped graphics) for free.
Finally, WXMaxima, a spiffy mathematics program, is convenient, but not necessary.
Here is the main software I used. It’s all free. These programs (except, of course, Ubuntu, which is a flavor of Linux) will run on Windows, and many are available for the Mac:
- Libre Office – An office suite with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing functions.
- Inkscape – Vector graphics program.
- GIMP – Raster (bitmapped) graphics program. Available for Linus, OS X, and, if you must, Windows. (GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. GNU is a free software, mass collaboration project dating from 1983. Look it up!)
- WXMaxima – Algebra program. This is a very powerful program. I’m using about 0.01% of it’s capability by using it to check the calculations for the worksheets.
- Ubuntu – A Linux operating system. I gave up my Mac about 15 years ago and started using Linux. I’ve only ever used Windoze when I was forced to. With Linux, you don’t have to pay for software or worry about your license expiring. Warning: don’t try Linux or you’ll never go back to Windows or Mac!
Tales of Flipping
The Half-Flip. When I got interested in flipping the classroom, I decided to try a half-lecture half-worksheet class. I was teaching a Tuesday-Thursday class and so I could do a respectable-length lecture then pass out the worksheet. When I passed out the worksheets, here’s what happened: the first question was about the first thing in the reading, the first thing I talked about in lecture, and oh, by the way, the answer is right next to that bold key word right there in the book open on your desk. Sigh.
Student strategy: don’t read anything, write down everything Dr. Osterhout says as fast as you can without thinking about it, and memorize everything at the last minute right before the exam. This wasn’t an isolated case. The strategy was pervasive. Since that semester, I haven’t given a lecture.
I still give reading assignments, although few student actually read the book. The homework assignment before the class helps insure that there has been a modicum of engagement of the material before the student comes to class. The quiz at the beginning of the class motivates them to pay at least a little attention to what is going on. The result is that my sections have gone from the bottom to the top of the sections on the common exams and on the cumulative American Chemical Society final exam.
Student Evaluations. My student evaluations are mediocre. Half the student wind up really liking the worksheet method and half hate it. Mix “best professor” with “worst professor” and you get an average score, which at a primarily teaching university, puts you in the toilet. Be warned, your student evaluations may suffer.
The biggest complaint I get is: “the professor doesn’t teach” sometimes with the caveat “I had to teach myself”. The freshman students who have never experienced a non-lecture class equate “lecturing” with “teaching”. To the caveat “I had to teach myself”, I say “YES!”.
Repeating Myself. Sometimes, I answer the same question for multiple groups. Students at neighboring groups listen in. I had a student accost me once (he was loud and indignant) “You just answered the same question three times. Why don’t you just lecture?” The reason is simple: when a group asks me a question they want to know the answer right then. They are receptive. That is the right time to tell them. The groups get ready at different times. It won’t do me any good to tell them before they are ready, they don’t yet know that they want to know! So I repeat myself.