The Flipped Classroom — To Video or Not To Video

Apparently, the suspicion that students can’t learn unless we professors speak knowledge to them is still very much with us.

On February 28, I attended CHEMFLIP 2015 in Austin Texas sponsored by Sapling Learning. It was a great little meeting. I met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot.

Of all the aspects of the meeting, I was struck by something that seemed to pervade the thinking about the flipped classroom. This was that the student ought to be required to view video lectures or at least have them available.

I began my experimentation with a flipped classroom about five years ago. At the time, I had no ready source of video lectures. Additionally, as I am department chair as well as a general chemistry professor, I did not have the time then and do not have time now to make my own videos. So, in the beginning, I went without by necessity. My first flipped course consisted of reading assignments followed by worksheets in class.

Of course, the students had never before considered it necessary to actually read the textbook before coming to class. So when they showed up, they were expected to work problems as if they knew what they were doing. They were vociferous in their complaints. They can’t work the problems in class, they don’t understand the book, the homework is out of sync with everything and, most importantly, I was a green meanie for not just telling them what to know (that is, lecturing). Sigh.

The second year, things got smoother. We changed books and homework systems. I started to use the online homework in a different way. I assigned reading and online homework before they did their worksheets in class. On the next online homework, they got problems from the last worksheet as well as problems on the new material. Weekly quizzes helped to prepare them for the tests. They still hated it. They still complained. However, now there was a small difference: my sections had begun to move up the standings on the shared exams we gave in a multi-professor course.

The third year the class had access to ThinkWell^TM videos through the OWL homework system. So when I could, I assigned ThinkWell videos to go with each class period. Now the students had professionally prepared videos that they could go to any time and replay as often as they wanted. Maybe the carping will stop, I thought. Well, the carping did stop. Did the students use the videos? Now, that’s another story.

I took a poll at the end of the semester in the Fall of 2013. I asked the students what they found to be the most useful of the various tools for learning at their disposal. The results are below.

Usefulness of Learning Tools According to 1st Semester General Chemistry Students:

1) Worksheets/class activity.

2) Homework

3) Quizzes

4) Tutorials

5) Special Instruction (student proctors)

6) Videos

7) Office hours (only about six student came to the office hours the entire semester.)

I was shocked. After all that carping, the videos weren’t being used. Note that the ThinkWell videos approximate lectures. They are on the order of 45 minutes long. I think the videos themselves were very good, but the students just wouldn’t sit for that long outside class and engage the videos. But they had lectures and at least they stopped carping.

In October of 2014, I attended the 58^th Robert A. Welch Foundation Conference on Chemical Research. This annual conference is usually about high-powered science, but this year it was devoted to chemical education. Eric Mazur from Harvard University gave a talk, “Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning”. During part of this talk Dr. Mazur described a study where the researchers identified fifteen things the students could use to help them master the material (for instance, the book, classroom activities, videos, the internet, etc.). The worst students used 1 or 2, the middle students used 4 or 5 and the best students (scary good – bright and knowledgeable enough to be professors (this is Harvard, remember)) used 7-8 methods of self-instruction. Interestingly, no two students used the same set. So learning is individualized (no big surprise there) and we can’t just tell them “do these seven things and you’ll make an A”. With this in mind, at the beginning of this semester, my class and I identified  things that the students could do to help themselves.

Learning Aids Identified in My Flipped 2nd Semester General Chemistry:

• Worksheets – Consist of learning objectives and problems for the day.

• Daily quizzes. They pay attention to the daily homework assignments and use the textbook and other sources to do well on the homework so thery are ready for the daily quizzes.

• My twice a week hour-long tutorial sections.

• Office hours, one hour four times a week.

• The book (Chemistry Fourth Edition, Gilbert, Kriss, Foster and Davies)

• The online homework (we are using SmartWorks). I assign problems for them to work before the material is introduced in class. I leave the problems open for practice.

• ChemTours. The Smarworks system provides short videos on selected topic. These videos are on the order of six to twelve minutes long.

• Assigned Kahn academy videos. I assign these when I can find them and I think they correspond well with the material being covered.

• Self-identified videos. I encourage the students to share anything they find, but there isn’t a good mechanism for sharing. I’m going to set up a Blackboard discussion group next year to help with this.

• UC Davis ChemWiki. Some of the students discovered this themselves. It is very good, but it often goes into greater depth than our class or uses nomenclature that is slightly different. I tell the students about it in the beginning now.

• Special instruction (SI). We have a strong SI program at my institution and usually have an SI instructor assigned to our first semester chemistry class.

• Study groups. I arrange my students into groups of four for class. These groups sometimes turn into study groups. Other groups form from the honors students, the jocks, the pre-vets and the physics majors.

• The American Chemical Society (ACS) study guide. We give the ACS finals in both the first and second semester. The ACS study guide is helpful all by itself for explaining concepts and for practicing problem solving.

• The tutoring center. Our university has a tutoring center that employs students to serve as tutors in different disciplines. The center sends a report when a student comes in. The report just says: Jane Doe came the tutoring center Wednesday, April 29.

I will poll my students next week to see what they used to help themselves and in a future post I hope to correlate these things with performance in the class.

In the meantime, I leave you to ponder this: Do the students need to have knowledge spoken to them in order to learn? I think not. It is different strokes for different folks. Each student has to take the responsibility to find his own best way to learn.

This post is co-posted at Flipped Chemistry. www.flippedchemistry.com is a community of chemical educators hoping to aid others in the process of flipping the classroom.