 One of the biggest concerns I hear when I talk about flipped classrooms to people is that students won't work outside of class. And I say that you're right to worry about that, but in fact what students will and won't do is mainly a function of assessment and course design. Joe Biden once said, don't tell me what you value, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value. And in a course, assessment tells students what we value. So when I first gave up lecturing, I was terrified that students wouldn't actually engage with the online materials. So the first main goal of my assessment plan was that students would do that. Now I had the questions in between videos so I could see where the students had done that, but in order to make sure that they did it on time, I had to make sure that I gave them marks only for doing those questions, provided they do it in the correct week. Those questions are deliberately quite simple though. They're mainly aimed at making sure that students are actually following the videos and have understood the key point before moving on. So while it's entirely possible that students might have been taking careful notes or looking up extra material and trying to engage with that material on a deeper level, there's nothing driving that yet just from those questions. So I also had weekly assignments. Now I wanted students to be able to do these without coming to their class. In some other words, I wanted them to be able to do it straight off the self-paced learning materials. So they weren't particularly hard, but they were sufficiently complicated that students had to actually process and try and use these tools for the first time. And the advantage of this method is that students really needed to engage with that material before they came to class. One disadvantage would be that students having trouble would need some kind of extra help, and so I gave optional help outside of class. And because that help was optional, perhaps unsurprisingly quite a small fraction of the class would tend to take it up, but those that did take it up found it incredibly valuable. Now if that structure doesn't suit you for some reason, there are lots of other possibilities. You could still have things like weekly assignments, you could still have something that looks like some piece of assessment that they have to do, but they might have to do that when they first come into class, and so you're spending a little bit of your class time to do that. Of course that's suboptimal because you lose some class time, but it's good because you don't have to then schedule things outside that. If you want something easier again you could replace all of those weekly assignments by something done completely online. That's easier in terms of maintenance from the educators point of view. On the other hand it will take a lot more time to set up, and those online exercises could be something a little bit more complicated than the in-between video assessment that you had and therefore get students to engage on a slightly deeper level than they did when they were just going through, and all of those things in some combination will help drive your students to actually engage with your online materials on time. Now the second goal we might have is to make sure that students actually turn up to class. We want them turning up to class because there are things that you can provide in a face-to-face experience that simply you don't get when you're doing a fully online experience. And so one obvious way to get students to turn up to class is you could have some assessment in that class. For example, the one that we suggest is an alternative for the weekly assignments in the point above. So here what you get is you get immediately an incentive to turn up, you get immediately an incentive to learn beforehand, and the negatives are that you're spending class time, which is a major cost. Remember, trying to free up face-to-face time for actual dialogue was one of our main goals in this method in the first place, so that's a definite negative. And for my course there was another serious negative associated with this option, which is that it really affected the culture of the in-class time. Because some of my goals for using that in-class time really depended on students doing extension work, and to do extension work in a way that they felt free to make mistakes, to have a go and make mistakes. I wanted them to get beyond the get the ball through the hoop kind of approach of doing problems, all the way through to actually thinking for themselves and dealing with more complicated situations. And one of the main reasons why students shut down and come back from that kind of approach is that they feel that stuff is on the line. When there's a lot of pressure to get marks, students are focused on doing tasks that get marks. When there's no pressure to that, then students can really be creative and there's no downside to it. And so I really wanted a situation where once the students were through the door, they could really engage without fear. And for that reason, what I did is I simply made my classes compulsory. In other words, they had to attend a certain fraction of classes to pass. And whether or not that's possible or appropriate for your courses are a matter of circumstances. Now those two goals are essentially just to make sure that your students are engaging with your course properly. But naturally, your course will have learning goals, particular tools or skills that you want students to have, particularly abilities you want them to have, things you want them to have been exposed to. And for those, you just have the normal plethora of assessment possibilities. And the reason I bring that up is that exactly what you put in those assessment items is going to have some pressure back on the assessment choices you make to make sure that people are turning up to your class and to make sure people are engaging with your online materials. Because you don't want to overly assess one particular skill set and you don't want to overload your students. And so you need to design this assessment plan as one coherent entity. Well, that's enough generalities. Now it's up to you to use any or all of those ideas for your own teaching. If you've got any great ideas that we'd love to hear from you, don't be afraid to get in touch. If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of how we made these videos, that can be found in the implementation sections below. And best of luck with your teaching.