 Right, so you turn up to university all full of beans and joy or whatever and then you sit down in lecture theatre with a wild hangover and you have your pens and paper and all this fancy stationery you've got to write your notes and then this dune sweater vest and unfashionable shoes stands at the front bumbles with the data projector for a few minutes and then says okay who did the pre-reading and you just think oh f*** well you've just had your first experience of what's known as a flipped classroom and you may have seen it before you may not have so let's talk about what it means what it doesn't necessarily mean and why we do it and the evidence we have for it and why you should definitely engage with it the best you can we often use jargon or buzzwordy terms like flipped lecturing or flipped classroom or active learning or blended learning and to be frank the exact definitions and variations aren't that useful for students to know about sorry educationalists but they're just not they basically mean that your learning takes place in different ways at different times depending on the context so in the traditional lecture layout you sit in a big hall someone talks at you for like 50 minutes and you write it all down then you revise your notes you do the tutorial workshop questions and then you come back for the exam done dusted now that is the extreme end it's probably not been the exclusive way students have been taught for like a decade or two though that was pretty much all I did in the 2000s and that sort of lecture does have its place a limited place but it does and I have several people try to stab me and I didn't add that caveat now at the other end there is the flipped approach here the information transfer the straight-up info dump the didactic monologuing that's all done before the lecture or the workshop session you watch a prerecorded lecture or you do the set reading and then you arrive having a good idea about what's going to be covered and then well well the exact details vary but you'll be more likely to ask questions answer questions and generally be more interactive the analogy used is like a driving lesson you don't get a lecture on how to drive and what to do from an instructor who then leaves you to sit alone in the car and do the driving on your own no no you sit there with an instructor doing the driving with you now we'll get into the details about how this works in practice but the gist is that a lecture won't just involve sitting down for an hour taking notes you will be doing things this is not always a popular method of teaching and it often produces student evaluations that are along the lines of oh well I didn't learn anything from this this is right and there are a few reasons for that cynically some academics think that this is because students feel entitled and just want answers and they want to sit still be passive be told everything and then regurgitate at all at the end and okay there's there's possibly some truth there we have seen a motivation change since the introduction of higher fees and now that we have a more free market approach to education people want things but that is not the whole story one good reason that it can be unpopular is because learning is actually very hard work it's cognitively demanding you're building new connections in your brain and that's difficult it's time consuming it's physically draining and tiring so if you are more active in a workshop learning by doing being forced to contribute to discussions or to answer questions or to solve problems it may physically hurt your brain will interpret this as discomfort so yeah you're unlikely to feel good at the time not always true but it is a common experience also the at the time aspect is very important because how you feel about and reflect upon your experiences change over time and we know that people become more appreciative of difficult situations as they can see benefits over time they see personal growth that they have because of it and they see the practice become used later on and that might not be realized for years to come your experience of a different kind of lecture is also wrapped up in expectations there is a cultural expectation of what a lecture should be like it's seen all over popular culture tv's books movies science documentaries you name it they all feature the same perspective of what higher education should look like it is a single person stood at the front of a wood paneled room talking and writing on chalkboard any deviation from that is seen as negative purely because it doesn't meet the expectation now to be clear i'm starting with this not because you will definitely have a bad time with a flipped classroom it's just important to say that it's a possibility that you could feel that way it's not an invalid feeling to have but it's not one that means you're having a bad experience or that it has been designed to hurt or neglect you okay so why why flip things why blend things or whatever was the word we're using well to address that let's look at why lectures exist as they do originally lectures were efficient ways of transferring information from one person to many others one person stands at the front lectures to a large crowded room and memetic information transferred and traditionally that's the only way it could be done and by traditionally i do mean hundreds of years ago but we also know that this isn't always the best way of learning and it's certainly not the best use of time when you're in the same room as an expert for a limited number of hours per week for one thing you probably only have an attention span of seven to ten minutes at most that's how long you can concentrate hard on something without a break or change of pace or some other jolt to reset you you can probably push to 20 minutes if it's not too taxing but 50 minutes no no your recall will be shot by then you will not be learning anything new in those last 20 minutes of a conventional one-hour lecture i've certainly been there usually about two or three lectures into an afternoon session and i'm hallucinating rabbits coming out to the powerpoint slides because i'm physically tired and my brain has rotted this is a serious issue with very traditional lecturing also the passive experience of just receiving information doesn't let you practice doing anything it just provides an explanation or a method or you know just raw and structured information to you and receiving that is the easy bit but you also need to process it for to go into your long-term memory and then get arranged and sorted and then you need to take time to retrieve it and practice using it the actual difficulties that you face then happen outside the lecture theater where you're in the library trying to desperately reread a textbook because you can you're trying to understand something that you missed or when you open up your first problem sheet and you realize that you have no idea where to start and the example of lecture notes looks completely different so this traditional layout of a lecture has its limits now this is where a turn of tenure professor scoffing up well my lectures aren't like that those are bad lectures my lectures are brilliant and well received and interactive and is it though we have some evidence from time-ordering sessions that this isn't true people who claim to have a lot of interactivity often don't the idea of flipping the classroom solves this problem by putting the initial info dump online as pre-reading as pre-watching the advantages here are that you can take it at your own pace you can reread or rewatch and you can make your own notes at your own pace and not need to frantically scribble things down you can also do it comfortably without needing to perch yourself on a miniscule desk or on a bench if you've rewatched the recording of a lecture to catch bits you've missed you should recognize that it's usually the most useful bit of lecture capture we also know that this can be very good at improving the awarding gap between different groups of students students who have to commute long distance to the university benefit a lot if there is material online to be consumed at any pace part-time students students with children students with jobs they can all benefit from the flexibility of choosing when to take on the material but it is not just online lecturing no you are not in fact just learning from videos these are the starting points after you've consumed that material when you're in the lecture theatre the main aim is to answer questions or even ask them yourself you get to do the problems work with the instructor sometimes there's a workshop sometimes more of a tutorial it depends on what material is and who's running it the objective is to check that you've learned what you should have learned from the pre-reading or watching and that you didn't accidentally acquire any misconceptions in the process because that's obviously a possibility when you're learning no matter how good your instructor is you might get the wrong end of the stick and get lost and you don't want to realise that only when you get your exam mark back so if anything a flip classroom acts as a very important feedback mechanism and students are always wanting feedback it's a very big thing on the national student survey this means that normally a flipped session will begin with a recap or a quiz to see what you already know and that can be done in multiple ways we can go around the room and ask we can do worksheets we can use the audience response software which is really good because you don't need to worry about getting an answer wrong it's all anonymous now if everyone got it right there's no need to waste time explaining that question you just move on if we come to a question and everyone gets it wrong we can stop and discuss it in more detail and that is as usual lecturing it's one guy at the front and about what a best and a weird beard talking to you didactically that is just straight up telling you the right answer but it is more efficient because we're not boring people with trivial things that they already know so a flip session isn't or at least shouldn't just be all problems and questions and doing stuff and workshopping it's a method that allows an instructor to respond to people and to interact we can even blend things a little more you put the opening quiz online have people submit answers and you go uh yep you got the first five questions right but let's unpack this one because you've all got it wrong and then you go from there providing feedback to students this does have some downsides that we as instructors have to take into account it's not generally a secret that you should do some work outside the contact time usually the recommendation is about one hour per hour of lecturing that you get at least but if we set you the reading and the watching and the quiz taking and stuff to do outside the lecture that adds to the workload so we need to make sure that it's calibrated correctly and that's not always easy to do so from our perspective our course is the only thing buddy it feels trivial to keep adding to it but from a student's perspective it's one of a dozen things happening in all at once each with their own demands for time so if anything flipped or blended learning is about structuring and guiding that self-study time and not everyone gets that balance right especially if it's their first time running a course this way I've certainly fallen into that trap when I was starting out but generally speaking this works really well it's an approach with a fair history it's been used a lot and formally studied a lot and we know what sort of problems work best for this approach and which ones benefit the least from it when we give students the flexibility and freedom to take information at their own pace they learn better and they learn more equitably when we then bring them into a workshop setting and we have better discussions and better feedback is exchanged if you don't understand something you don't need to be brave and put your hand up and interrupt a lecture to say so it's literally expected of you to do that so this has been a brief introduction for students to what the point of flipped or blended learning is whatever you want to call it hopefully you've learned a bit about why we do it and why we're doing it more often but how should you approach it well first engage with the online material that is there to start you off it's usually made by the person teaching you and it's really useful for them if you watch it and try to take it in or read watch whatever but please make all the effort to do it because it can be very hard to set it up and it allows us to save a lot of time in the classroom itself don't be put off by the online lectures part they tend to be good even the worst ones will benefit you at the very least they give you an indication what the session will be about so you won't be surprised i wish i had this when i was an undergraduate you can always watch it at double speed as well you can always watch it at double speed as well if you don't understand a bit don't worry write it down then bring your notes with you to the session some people will provide you with gapped handouts for these videos sometimes you can scribble them yourself but either way do engage with it and do the quizzes if they're online anyone learning them needs to see people getting it right or wrong if you don't do it because you're scared of the wrong answer well it's going to look like everyone got it right and you're never going to learn the right answer you're not being examined here you're interacting and you're learning it is part of the process being wrong on these quizzes all the feedback bits can be good they prompt us have much better discussions and when it comes to the live session be bold talk generally academics like this sort of teaching it's more interactive it's more interesting it's doing what we want to do i can only speak for myself but i don't like standing in front of a big room and talking i'd rather circulate talk with people and have the freedom to mess with brown dancer questions go for a bit of peace every now and then this is a great way to help build a relationship with your lecturers with your instructors and even your peers because a lot of workshop activities can involve group work and discussion you can get help from others in a way that you can't if you all you have to do is tune in and listen to the monologue so that's flipped learning and why we're using it and i hope you can see the benefits too