 Let me begin by welcoming everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the host cat herder and creator of the forum And I'm delighted to see so many of you here tonight Now what I'd like to do is I'd like to welcome our guest this week Professor Robert Talbert is a professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University in Michigan Not only is he a mathematician not only is he helping run his department, but on the side he invests Mathematics including with technology. He's recently published a very exciting book on the flip classroom methodology And I'm really grateful for him to come so we can talk about what it means to flip a classroom in 2019 Professor Talbert, welcome Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me on. Oh, I'm glad you're here. I'm absolutely delighted You're coming to us from Michigan, so I'm guessing I'm a little chilly right now It's not too bad 40 ish degrees, you know, we're through the 20s to through the snow the January and November thing So I'll take it. Well, it's 40 above zero. I mean, that's the Well, let me ask as a way of getting me to introduce people. I've told them your title I told them about your book. Let me ask this question What do you anticipate spending most of your time and thinking on for the next year? Um, well, I'm can split that into personal and work I've got the three teenage kids at home. So I spent a lot of time thinking about them and what they need I guess But here at work at Grand Valley State I'm a professor in the math department, but I'm also currently the department chair in the math department and We have we're undergoing some very interesting changes at Grand Valley. We have a new president a relatively new provost We're getting a new dean in our college And so there's a lot of leadership turnover a lot of really good questions being asked about the future of higher education actually and what it means for us here at EBSU and Investigating some pretty pretty bold potential moves University-wide and so I as a department chair. I'm thinking about how do I make this work? How do I enact these big ideas kind of on the human scale when I have to think about salary workload? Personal evaluation student complaints facilities in the whole nine yards So that that keeps me thinking a lot and I'll probably will be thinking about that for some time to come Wow, that's a very impressive strategic perspective I mean into which you can work your research about teaching and learning, but it adds to it all that initiative there It's true. It's true. Well, and you'll be teaching at the same time though, right? I'm teaching one class right now, but I have no classes next semester actually Because I normally teach six credits a year and I'm teaching a single five credit course right now So I since I'm new to this I kind of fell into the position I wasn't actually looking to be department chair But we had some leadership turnover and I was in kind of the right place at the right time I said if I'm going to be learning this stuff on the job. I want a little bit of relief from teaching Teaching is not something I need relief from but it's nice to have single-minded focus on learning how to do the job I actually have in front of me so I'm glad you here Have everybody who thinks about the future of education. We're glad to hear someone that's foresightful lose yourself Taking your hand at the helm. Good luck. Thanks now Before we proceed just friends if you're new to the forum and I get I do want to thank people who've just come in folks like I like Carl Teresa's baby looks and Chi Teresa and Annette The way this works is I have a ton of questions, which I can ask a poor guest So we can listen to a simple interrogation, but I rather not the real strength of this technology The real strength of the form is that you get to participate you get to ask your questions So what I'd like you to think about is what you'd like to ask this expert in flip classrooms, for example Do you are you in the middle of a flipping exercise? And you'd like to see some advice Are you leading a large program at effort to flip program flip classes in a school or a department or a division? Have you had some experience and you'd like to share your thoughts or would you like to ask the most basic questions? Like what the heck is a flip classroom? What does that mean 2019? All these questions are welcome. We're glad to hear them So just either press the question mark button and type in your questions so I can flash it and read it out loud Or if your camera is on we're friendly. We all fight just press the raised hand button and you can join us up here in stage So then we just asked just to get the ball rolling while people are they're bringing the percolating thinking How do you define the flip classroom right now? Sure. Well a flip classroom I tend to say the word flip learning instead of flip classroom because I'm trying to de-emphasize the idea of a classroom This is an idea that can take place in any sort of modality whether it's online or hybrid or in any sort of situation It's a pedagogical approach where you're the students first contact with new ideas Does not happen in a shared group environment But rather before that group environment takes place on the students end and their individual spaces That's where they receive first contact with new ideas Through some sort of structured activity Okay, and so what that does is it frees up time and space in the group activity group space when that when that comes around whether it's a regular Classroom setting or whether it's an online Group discussion board participation if freeze that up for more active learning They become someplace where students are taking the basics which they have learned On their own prior to the group setting And then taking them a couple of notches up to more of the analysis and application level when everybody's together And so that group space is transformed into something that's really dynamic focused on applications and analysis and creative engagement That sounds like a First I mean I have to say If I imagine myself as someone new to the field that's a very very clear term It's a very clear description of how flip how flip learning works, and I appreciate your distinction Uh as someone who's been doing this, um, I think you nailed it. I mean that's that's that's really really precise Especially like the way at the end that you unfold the real Variety and potential of what we can do in the new type of classroom this way Sure. Yeah, it's it's all about Optimizing and maximizing the amount of active learning generally speaking that takes place on the students learning environments If you contrast it with a traditional classroom setup, which we all know and we've all been through You come into a group setting Basically, it's assumed that you're tabular rossa that you have no idea You've never studied or never touched or shook hands with the new concepts You get them right there in the group setting And then you are sent out of the group setting to your individual context in your dorm room in your apartment Whatever and then you're supposed to work this out And so that to me seems like a misalignment of the context and the activity Okay, we're giving the simplest activities to students when we have the most amount of help available And we're taking by the help when they're reaching the most complex activities So what it does is it just merely aligns the context with the activity and makes everything active I mean, I think we've seen a lot of us have seen the studies the freeman study In preceding international academy of sciences and all the science that's out there that that is pointing towards active learning Being the best sort of approach for students And so we should be asking ourselves like how do I get this Active learning into as many cracks and crevices into my students learning experiences as humanly possible And so flip learning is one way to do that by making the individual space active and the group space active at the same time Hmm, so it's a species of active learning um Friends i'm i'm going to run a story Past our guest, but again, I would love to hear what thoughts you have what questions and Any objections any pushback anything where this can't work for me or I wonder about the problem My story is actually about my wife. Um, keredwin inherited a class on emergency services Where the students would take the class at the end of the class they would have to take a certifying exam And the pass rate for the exam when she inherited this was very low, so like 20% Well, it turned out that the class curriculum she inherited was entirely lecture based with lectures lasting up to four hours at a time And uh, and this was a very practical class where people would have to learn how to do triage That's to learn how to you know pick up people on on structures So she took all their classes Turned them to audio files and published them as podcasts Made them available to the students and then turned the class entirely into discussion face-to-face Conversation, but also role-playing um And after some dizzying moments from the students the pass rate went up as then like 75 percent it was just Would this be a good example of the foot classroom in your case? Oh, absolutely. So it turns out when you are trying to teach people how to do things They weren't it best by actually doing the things Uh, I think that when we look to our own experiences in the past like everything that we know everything that we're good at doing That we really value in our lives We learn by doing it at some point and if there's a lecture involved It's really only useful to the extent that it impels us to do things Uh, and so it's in the doing that we actually do the learning So I would say absolutely yes. I mean do the students get first contact with these ideas of emergency services through Before a group setting in their individual spaces through a structured activity. Yes, okay Did they use the group space did your wife use the group space to structure into an active and dynamic Applications oriented learning environment where students are working together. They're failing together. They're figuring it out together Yes, so I mean that's that to me is absolutely flip learning. It's very active and it's focused and it's structured Well, this sounds well, so my wife would be very pleased to hear this and I want to uh, I want to hear from everybody else Um, you have any examples of this. Have you yourselves? Um, I've been doing this. Have you flipped a class? Um, or part of a class, um, or are you looking to do that? Um, and right now we have a quick question this comes up from the awesome rock santa rizkin And we just put this on the screen for everyone to see Um She would like to know what are the what are the best technologies? That best support active learning like web annotation through hypothesis, etc Great. Well, I would say that the technology Envelope that you put around a flip learning environment first of all I I I gave that definition a while ago specifically to be quite technology agnostic You notice there's no mention of you got to have a video present or something like that Because I kind of feel like the technology is there in service of the active learning and the environment you're creating But to answer your question, um, it it varies quite heavily from discipline to discipline In my discipline of mathematics, uh, web annotation like hypothesis is a great tool Perusal is another great tool If I had a text that I wanted students to mark up socially as part of and that's the way I want them to get their first contact with new ideas prior to the classroom That's a great technology to use In mathematics, uh, quite often The best way for students to get first contact with the concept is by playing with an idea through a demo And so I use a tool called desmos.com. It's an online free graphing calculator tool And I will often set them students up with, uh, you know some sort of demo to play with it It allows to pretty interactive graphs and so forth Like right now my pre-calculus students are learning about polynomial functions And what the parts of a polynomial function do and so rather than give them a video about this I did give them a video about this and a text to read but I gave them this interactive, uh, little Applet and I said go to this applet and play around a little bit and tell me what you see That's their that's their pre-classwork. And so we come into class, uh, or to the discussion board because it's a hybrid class Needs once a week. It's online the rest of the time and that's their first contact with new ideas So they're the the technology again is quite dependent on the situation like your wife's emergency services The audiophile thing was probably the right choice because that's what you have available For others who are in sort of the health sciences field. I know our nursing program at grand valley does Quite a lot of flip learning and they're very heavily into simulations Uh, pretty similar to the emergency services thing. So they have their technology looks like mannequins. That's what it is That's their educational technology that they use is like life-size dummies that have like realistic body parts on the inside and so on Um, I have a a colleague matt roberts at grand valley to just compute, uh, political science And he uses hypothesis to have students mark up and discuss, uh, supreme court decisions before they come into class to do even further discussion on this So, uh, so and there are tools for science. There are tools for history. There are tools for just sort of text in general If if I had to give one straight answer to that question If it's if it's a textual approach that you're taking I think hypothesis and perusal are very good tools But also it can be done with very little technology whatsoever Um, I think that you could possibly flip a class without using any sort of digital technology if you really put your mind to it I've heard from Some people in the humanities, which is my background They will say that they've been Flipping the classroom forever because you know, they sign students to read text in philosophy or history and and then when they come to class They discuss it And my usual rejoinder is well, how much lecturing do they do and they usually say oh none at all But it turns out there's actually a lot. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, and there's often not much structure in the assignment and that's why for me when I talk about flip learning It involves structured activities before the group space happens Okay, so students are getting first contact in their individual space the way structured activity I've heard a lot of people say well, we've been flipping the classroom for 600 years But what they mean by that is like I give my students. I say reach after three and come ready to discuss Well, that's not a lot of structure And you know students don't necessarily know how to read a text in the way that we mean them to read a text And so if you're really flipping a class in that sense You would have reach after three and I'm ready to discuss But you might also have some guided notes to kind of help students point their attention in the right place To draw out the information you want them to have and in some way Teach them how to learn and have an instructional presence with them Even though you are not physically with them Just giving students chapter three to read and saying come to class ready to discuss is not enough structure for the vast majority of students that we have Or that people 600 years ago would have had either or that happen. Well true depending on on your students. Yeah So the key thing here is the use of structure for the out of class assignments You know, this is a good point Then um, Roxanne, I'm actually going to beam you up on stage because you have another question And I just can't keep reading you without having you know having you on stage Um Roxanne your question is a fully online course Hi Roxanne. Hi Ryan. Hi. Thank you for answering So, um richly those um Questions that I had um this one is how would you flip a fully online class? Well, that's a great question. I've actually done it twice And I'm also hybrid courses because I have taught online and hybrid courses here at grand valley The definition still applies. Okay. So there's an individual space and a group space. It's not a physical space It's more of a context. Okay and so Unless we're talking about a synchronous online course, I'm thinking of asynchronous online courses where there's no meeting whatsoever I think that's that's uh, it seems to be the majority of online courses out there so in those courses you will want students to engage with Some very basic sort of the bottom two levels of bloom stacks on me just understanding and remembering On their own before they engage in any sort of group work with other other students and then When they engage with other students in a group setting and oftentimes that's on sort of the discussion board or something like that Where there is an asynchronous group back and forth happening. That's where the application and analysis takes place Okay, so in my past online courses, uh, you structure them on weekly on a weekly module basis So in a typical module which would run from monday to sunday. Let's say, um, I release Some activities for students to do On sunday night and so they spend monday and tuesday working through these introductory activities that give them first contact with new ideas about calculus or whatever And then they would turn something in the certify that they've done this and to give me some data about what they know And what they don't know and then the wednesday thursday of that week would be spent Working together as a group on the discussion board, uh, whatever tool you might want to use On something it's a little bit higher level like the middle third of bloom stacks on me the analysis and apply part and uh, so that might in my case that took the form of uh, of a Little application problems that are not extremely hard, but they're not extremely easy either And just giving those to student groups. Okay You folks are in charge of this problem You folks are in charge of this problem and setting them up to work together and then post a solution for the entire class to discuss So it's the analog of working at the board in a in a synchronous class meeting And so did students get their first contact with new ideas before the group setting? Yes Uh, did they then use the group setting to apply those activities doing something dynamic and interactive? Yes Okay, and so and then the rest of the week could be spent on whatever a more discussion or assessment or whatever the case may be So it's uh, you can partition an online class into a flip setting in fact It's quite well set up for that. In fact, uh hybrid courses in particular are perfectly aligned for uh for flip learning. Yeah, there's almost no Structure construction needed it works right out of the box And for online you just have to have a good discussion board and that seems to be the bottleneck in most most technological cases Are you using a lot of um cameras? video Or zoom rooms that are very popular. I've been doing zoom rooms for years and the um And if not, how are how do you bridge that one if students don't have good bandwidth or access to the video cameras? and just to uh kind of Add one more piece to that What if students don't want to participate or um in in that group activity? How do you? assess their learning Okay, so let me unpack the the first question first, which is about sort of the the technology and how we interact I have not used Like live zoom or shindig. This tool is really great. Actually, uh, I want to look into this like Like live cameras for that sort of thing in the past like ever I love zoom and I use it all the time, but I've never used it in a class for that kind of setting No real reason for that. I just haven't done it. What I have done in the past is have students Record themselves at a whiteboard working out problems. Okay as part of their assessment procedure So they have online homework. Uh, we use a system that will get some given us some exercises and they'll type in an answer And they'll tell you whether the answer is right or not But it doesn't check them work and so I've had student I would have students just take their phones or borrow a phone and go to a whiteboard or just Like a post-it note and write it or write something on here and record yourself working through the problem And then post it to a youtube channel that we have for the class So that's that's something that doesn't require a ton of bandwidth and it can be done sort of When they have the chance to do it like they could come on campus or they could go to the library and Here's their phone use a whiteboard use a big piece of paper I've had students write on the refrigerators before because it couldn't find anything in their own apartments In the and recently I've just been going with straight text and just using a discussion board tool called campus wire It's a relatively new product still very much a beta product But it's a really great sort of mash-up between A discussion board and like a slack workspace It has sort of the immediacy of a slack chat back and forth But it also has a threaded discussion So it doesn't get too wild and crazy and also lets me enter in math notation Math notation for me my discipline is a huge bottleneck for uh for internet based Text tools just being able to enter things in So I've been kind of keeping it simple with the technology and not trying to do too much with the video Although I think you make a point that the video Really adds something to the sort of the human experience. And so I think if the next time I do a An online or hybrid course. I'm going to do more with that like with flip grid or something Where students are can see each other can talk to each other. I think you really it's a really important thing They don't want to lose It's really Stepping up their product It has come a long way and of course you've just been purchased by microsoft And so now you got the full force of the microsoft empire, you know, uh driving the the tech in there You were asking another question. I forgot what it was the second question not about technology, but about student participation Uh, this is a toughie because you know what I've learned I mean I've been teaching for over 20 years and what I've learned is uh, you can't make students do anything Okay, it's got to be sort of their idea and that is no different between online hybrid or face-to-face courses If I have a face-to-face course and I want students to work at a board and some student Is really just wants to sit there and put their head down I can assess them on it, but in the end I can only encourage them It has to be sort of consensus building all the way. It's a something. I'm also learning as department chair I have no authority whatsoever. I only have to build consensus for everything And so What I try to do the only thing I can do is give students stuff that they would want to work on That's easy to get right and what I mean by that is I would have students in the in that problem posting exercise that I mentioned All they have to do is just post something that's reasonably complete. It was full of errors full of holes full of nonsense That's totally fine because that gives us something to discuss further And so I'm only assessing students on whether they do the thing and then also I require that they follow up on the thing Somewhere or another I'll come in and post some questions about I had a question about this line over here Or maybe somebody else does and they have to back up and actually answer the questions At some point and so it's like a two-point activity. It's real easy But just gets people off their you know or on their feet so to speak and actually doing something with the rest of the class Now one one more question. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense One more thing that popped into my head was To ask you how long does it take to Make a classroom a flipped classroom because a lot of professors Think this can be done. Maybe in a week or two or some may or some may think this could be three months or four months Yeah What is your timeline for flipping a class that has never been flipped before? Yeah, that's a really good question I was giving a workshop on flip learning at a university once and it was the week before classes started And I was so nervous because I was so afraid that people were gonna get all fired up about flip classrooms And just go do it never just be a total disaster unless you're starting from say a hybrid course like that's like halfway there already It definitely takes more than a week. I actually have a have this post on my blog about what I call the one year plan I don't think that it necessarily takes a year to Design to redesign or gut and remodel a class to make it a flipped experience But I really feel comfortable with a year And that's that's not only coming from zero at flipping that's coming from zero at active learning period So that's a plan where somebody who has never even touched active learning can go from being a straight lecture person to Doing effective flip learning in the course of one calendar year If you're familiar with active learning and you've been building into your courses You're way ahead of the game. All you got to think about is the sort of Flipping the structure of the course like the assignments in class and out of class D. Fink has this great workbook about the design of Significant learning experiences and he has this thing called a castle top diagram Or it's like you you do some stuff before class and then after class then before class then after class And that's how you designed your course and flipping that's literally flipped on its x-axis Where the stuff that you were normally doing Before now you've got to think about doing it in class So that takes some time to sort of get right I would say and for me if I were doing this from zero I want to prototype this first before I go full on into a semester long experience I could read truly miserable if you if you get stuck not knowing what you're doing. So I would say so like I said At the very bare minimum, this is like a summer project Like if you're teaching something in the fall, you're really thinking about flipping a class Give yourself the summer to like read D. Fink's book get familiar with some of the basic concepts of active learning Uh Like Jim Lang's small teaching book is a great great go-to resource For that sort of thing and then get the design right Okay, so that's that take some time, but it's more than a week, but it's less than a year Thanks, Brian. Thank you If you're if you're new to the forum, uh, this is how easy it is to ask video questions And what really helps is we'll only have a guest like professor albert Answers so deeply and for fingers I I can see the spirit of your Of your flip classroom at work right now um We uh, um, just a couple of quick notes and uh, and then I want to bring another uh, a prism it up on stage Uh, uh, Frick. Well, can you just repeat the name of that book? Um Is the one with the castle Um It's actually a work book. It's not even a book. It's it's called. Uh, it's by D. Fink D E Fink if I nk and it's uh, the design of significant learning experiences significant learning experiences is definitely in the title I should probably get this right if I'm gonna Right now while you're I do It's actually available for free online. I just uh, google this all Okay, you're gonna post it Designing significant learning experiences. That's what it's called Here is a I'm sorry 317 page pdf That uh, oh I also have a I if anyone who wants to uh tweet me or email me I have a workbook of my own that I wrote kind of inspired by D. Fink's workbook called seven steps to flip learning design And uh, maybe I'll shoot that out on the on twitter with the ftte tag here And so people it's free. So just take it. Um That's fantastic. Um speaking of which, uh, you uh, you you mentioned, uh, shindig. I'm sure we can get you a free account I wasn't showing for a free shindig account, but it's a really nice tool. I could see this I could really really see uh, how this could be used with students We've been using this for almost four years and I'm very fond of it. Um, so, uh, let's see if we can do that Um, but we had a question uh from the excellent kelly walsh And uh, I don't just say that because uh, I love all my guests Um and all the participants, but we've had kelly actually as a guest on the program before Kelly is a cio in upstate new york and he um among other things does a uh runs a consultancy and flipping classrooms So we have two I am outnumbered by two flipping gurus Hey kelly, how are you? Hey robert could see you hi brime We have kelly and I have been tweeting and emailing each other for probably four or five years But I've never actually spoken to you in person before so this is a We live in, you know to meet you I think I had actually Plugged your name into brian's head a while back And here we are One of the in the chat a question that came up that comes up so often in this scenario is What do you do when the students don't do the pre-work and of course my I always tell people well I mean to some extent that's not much different than students not doing homework. It's always been a problem There are you know various techniques and I'm just curious what what you how you like to approach that Okay, great question. That's what probably the there's two Questions I get more often than any that's like one a or one b. I'm not sure which one it is I want to say first of all that in my work with flip learning This actually doesn't happen too often I think sometimes people get to kind of jump right to a worst possible case scenario where The worst case scenario the doomsday scenario in a flip class would be you come in as an instructor and literally nobody has done any Work whatsoever that they are completely unprepared. They're at zero Completely blank slate. I can say that that has never happened to me in 10 12 years of running flip learning environments That that's sort of like everybody is completely unprepared very has never happened I've had situations where Three or four students out of 30 might be completely unprepared and I've had situations where maybe most of the students are really confused about one point but That I almost questioned the premise in some ways like what do you do if this happens? Well, this this doesn't actually happen that often, but if it were to happen This is what I would do and this is I think You know the first thing I can tell you what you don't do and that's you don't Fall back and reteach the material that they were supposed to have learned you absolutely have to Set the boundaries for the way the classroom is going to run and this will really put some students at a disadvantage momentarily But it will help them later on Because what we're about with flip learning is we're trying to get students not only to learn the material We're also trying to get them to learn how to learn the material Okay, this is a really really important facet of flip learning and it's really what higher education is supposed to be all about Higher education is education about education itself So when the the worst thing you could possibly do is say, okay Well, I'll just reteach them to because that just signals to the students like oh, this is great anytime I don't want to do the work I just won't and professor will just drop back and and It'll be just like high school just just like all my other courses, right? So what you do have to do is say Okay, we're not going to reteach the material because that was your responsibility and in college. We're all about responsibility Okay Now what we will do is I will give you a chance to You know, I will give you 10 minutes to peruse the material and come up with any Any specific question that you have on the material that you're supposed to have learned, okay Just give it a little bit of shot. Let's start with you in other words Let's start with what you can do with the material Okay, if you can look at the at the section on calculus on Like a section out of a calculus book and you may have not have read it But you can look through the first couple of sentences and read like the word functions Oh my gosh, I don't know what a function is. Well, raise your hand and let's start there Okay, we're not going to give up on active learning and we're not going to give up on you the students generating the questions Okay, that's the absolute bare minimum like minimum viable product for a flip classroom Um, and then, you know, you'd have to have a pretty good conversation with the students about what the expectations are And how this is going to run and especially the why behind What why we are using a flip learning environment or what they expect and what the roles for me The teacher and you the student are going to be that all has to happen in that class period So it has to be sort of a come to the altar moment in some ways Um, and I think most students get it. I think if you explain why And and and really follow through on these things and and also keep the pre-classwork relatively simple and easy to complete Uh, I think one of the great firewalls against the sort of doomsday experience that you're mentioning Kelly is just having pre-classwork that is engaging. Um, don't just give students read chapter three Okay. Well, how how do I read chapter three? I mean, this is like beowulf. I don't know what this is or if this is Calculus book. I mean, how am I supposed to read this? Instead give them something that's simple That's something that they can do and that's fairly Failure tolerant. I would say too like the way that you assess that in classwork or pre-classwork is really important I I grade that work only on completeness and effort And I they do it by using google forms and google spreadsheets And so they submit a google form or their answers to questions I can scan the spreadsheet and I can see what they know and what they don't know and I tell them look I want to know what you're struggling with if you're getting something wrong. That's great. That's awesome It always starts with getting something wrong, right? I want to know what it is that way I can finally tune what we do in class to exactly what you're going to do But if you're not going to do this work, I can't help you with this I mean, I'm not telepathic right. I got to know what you're what you're thinking and that's what this pre-classwork is all about So when I when I've explained in those terms, it's like I'm not trying to audit you I'm trying to just get into your head and see what you know what you don't know So I'll know what to do next. I let you go first Okay, this is like a turn-based game and instead of the instructor going first all the time The student goes first and the instructor goes second Resonates with I had this issue with my hybrid students this semester actually They weren't coming in like totally unprepared. They're doing kind of a superficial job of the pre-class activity So they were doing it and getting points for it, but it wasn't really sticking And I phrase it to them in those terms about you go first. I go second. They're like, oh, okay. That's how it's supposed to work That's not so threatening now. I mean, you're gonna go. I'm gonna go Okay, I'm gonna have a turn and you're gonna get this. Okay You're not I'm not just checking out of the class completely because I'm lazy or whatever I'm just going second That's it's funny. I mean I've been learning about this for since 2012 I've never heard that particular analogy, but it's a great one I just came up with it on the spot when I think I've been playing a board game with my son the night before and I thought I had this idea of like Somebody's got to go first. So why should it be me all the time? Right? Right? So another question much more a longer term thing So myself and and I'm part of the flip learning network at flip learning dot org And great organization by the way. Oh, thank you. Um, it's founded by uh, uh, Aaron samson john bergman that kind of widely recognized pioneers although others were doing it at the time as well But so now it's been kind of a decade of flip learning and I think those of us who have been immersed in it Feel may be a little frustration. I mean on the one hand it's it's spread continuously In a very grassroots kind of fashion. So I think, you know practically any school out there Even k-12 and of course higher ed you're gonna find people who are aware of this and are probably doing it. Um, it's not Um, and there are actually entire university systems. Although most of them outside of the us That have adopted the model But that being said, there's still so many people who have not heard of it. Don't understand it. Um And I struggle with is it is the term becoming just kind of old and therefore it's losing some of its excitement or you know What what needs to happen to continue to raise awareness of this? You know, what's kind of the long-term trajectory? And I'm just Yeah, that that was a really great question. I think about that quite a bit myself and I don't know You're correct that I mean flip learning is growing I mean I have these posts that I do once a year on my blog where I go through and do a little lit search on any, uh peer reviewed publication that's been published in between year in and year now Uh in the last 12 months that has flip learning or flip classroom or inverted classroom Or any some of the other synonyms in there the title of the abstract that's been growing exponentially for for ever since 2014 It seems like so just keeps growing you're growing and growing, but you're right I mean it's still it's still we're still kind of in the early adopter phase. It seems like Um, I wonder sometimes if the word flipped sort of puts people off It does have sort of an unseriousness to it sometimes I think in higher ed that can I mean some people who are like quote unquote serious academics Don't necessarily want to be doing something as cutesy as flipping, right? Whenever you see people doing slide decks about this it shows people flipping upside down and stuff like that It's like this is kind of like amateur hour. It seems like I personally have no problem with the name But I can see where some people might I think what might be the biggest driver of flip learning for me in the next Five to ten years is the sort of the ascendancy of online learning and hybrid learning I'm beginning to think like flip learning should be sort of Classified in with hybrid blended and online instruction as a sort of a form of online instruction It's not fully online like it doesn't have to be online at all But it does have sort of a hybrid feel to it I tweeted out a while back like okay. Give me your best new terms for flip learning go and People gave me some crazy stuff. I think when I came up was a quasi hybrid I think that's a very interesting way to think about flip learning is sort of it's sort of hybrid But not necessarily technologically infused. It's like an analog hybrid if you will I kind of like that idea and as more and more universities I mentioned to To uh to brian at the beginning that at your grand valley, you know, we're thinking very very heavily about Rapid expansion of online and hybrid programs and micro credentialing like a lot of other universities are thinking about And so as that trend grows, I think that flip learning could very easily latch itself onto that So, you know, you know, what what goes for online learning also could go for us too And so, you know, if you're not into the tech side of the online learning think about a flipped environment as well Which is sort of like the hybrid, but you don't have to commit to the tech And i'm wondering if if we kind of hitch our wagon to that then more people will see this for what it is Like a real good redesign your courses, right good point It's you know, definitely a form of blended and and it's interrupt You know, people seem to get that, you know that blended makes sense and works. So in that context Uh, hopefully it's got a bright future Let me ask the two of you then really quickly What should we call classes that are not flipped not blended not hybrid not online Face-to-face Yeah, so yeah, well face-to-face is like opposed to online. And so a face-to-face class can be flipped too I I would I tend to just fall back on the old term traditional I guess it's sort of it it calls to mind The exact right picture. I think you know a person They're not all lecture courses and lecture itself is not necessarily an inherently evil idea You know, but when you say traditional classroom, you instantly think of a lecture hall Middle-aged white dudes standing up on on the on top of the stage and get like all three of us here In the picture in fact and a sage on the stage that kind of thing and it calls to mind the right sort of thing Now the traditional classes can be extremely well run. I've seen them. I've been through them myself. Absolutely. They can And so this isn't a disveraging term, but I do think that when you say traditional it it it connotes the right thing Paints the right picture, I would say I'm willing to accept your corrections to death Because it's uh, yeah I mean it seems like calling things by the right name is half the battle and higher red sometimes really can be Thank you Kelly for the great question and for the suggestion of bringing uh, Professor Albert on stage. Thank you Thank you and great to meet you Robert. Take care. You too Kelly see you learn And and thank you Robert for so so thoroughly addressing these questions I mean this gives us more of a hint of to what your foot property would like Friends we have about 10 minutes left So this is the time to share your thoughts and questions We've already covered a wide range from everything from faculty to support to Programs to technologies and in fact, we have another question here from Amanda Burbage Push this up on the screen so you can all see it I'd love to hear more about the I think that scholarship of teaching and learning aspect Who favorite designs or tips could you share? I'm in a faculty support position. This is becoming a priority at my institution Great question. I mean, uh, and uh, yeah, this is a one of the great developments in flip learning as a sort of discipline is it has become kind of a scholarly discipline with the scholarship of teaching and learning Um, when you look at the scholarship that is currently in existence on flip learning It's kind of a mix of quantitative and qualitative and some mixed methods approaches, um Quite a few of these studies are sort of classic quasi experiments where a professor might have two sections of world history and their Flip one and not flip the other and then give a common final exam and see how people do on it That's sort of a very traditional Quantitative approach to this. I think what's interesting What's more interesting to me because this quantitative approaches are sort of rife with Potential validity issues like okay. Well, you made the final exam You might have been really excited about flip learning and so it creates this Hawthorne effect that boosts final exam scores There's all kinds of questions about does it even generalize to somebody else's world history course or outsider world history? I think what to me what's more interesting is sort of the qualitative and mixed methods approached to studying flip learning and that is Where you get students into a flip learning environment and just talk to them and make observations about what they're experiencing And then try to draw patterns out of what you observe in their verbal responses or or their their behavioral responses That's very hard to do a qualitative research and I had to learn all about this I was on sabbatical a couple of years ago and running some studies and one of which was a study of how students with With with learning disabilities executive functioning disorders experience flip learning environments Uh, for example students who have autism spectrum disorder. How would how would an autistic student experience flip learning? I know this because I had an autistic student in a class It was flipped and it was it was really hard on him But I could also see where it could really be good for in the right ways if I just knew You know what the best practices were and so my collaborator and I took We had like 150 students in college algebra here at grand valley state and we managed to get five students with learning disabilities Only five because it's hard. We had some to self identify as students of learning disabilities To go through these flip courses. They were specially designed but specially made custom materials to run for the study And uh, we said we just simply sat down with them at the end of the semester and asked them a lot of questions about You know, how do you perceive yourself as a learner now that you've done this flip environment? How did you perceive yourself before as a learner? You know, what were your biggest struggles? What were your biggest successes? What what did you like? What did you not like? We got some really great data out of those five students That we're very we're quite surprising for us So we would not I think it would have been impossible to get if we were trying to make everything a number And run t tests or whatever. So I would really recommend, you know, reading up about Anybody's interested in doing sodal research on flip learning or anything I really think about the the qualitative Angle on it. It can really Tell some great stories Can you uh, well, it's it's always great to hear someone who works with numbers call for qualitative stuff It was a very much an alien world for me and I had to learn from total scratch. That's quite fascinating. Yeah Take a quick step back. I mean you mentioned trying to get students more comfortable And I have to say that you in particular have an extra burden of that because so many of your students have math phobia and different degrees Absolutely. I appreciate that but to come back to this. What were some of the surprises you got in Well, I think the biggest surprise with it We just found out that these students with learning disabilities are really good students. Uh, I mean they practice mindfulness techniques and self-regulation behaviors that I wish that all of my students would would perceive You know, like for example, they would we asked them like, where did you study when you were in your individual space Preparing for the flipped, you know, group space. Where did you go exactly to study because that's kind of an interesting question Like you go to the library You go to your are you in a busy space that kind of could conflict with your executive functioning disorder and that kind of thing And uh, you know, they get all kinds of different answers But what they all said was like I'll go to this one space and that's my go-to But when it gets too loud, I know I can't think and so I'm just going to move off somewhere So they have the sense built in sense of how to work around their disability That is really interesting That you know, they know when they are not learning well And I think that sometimes we think students with learning disabilities. Well, they just they're handicapped in some ways It's not really the case. They're just sort of the the old Politically correct term is differently abled, but that's actually true in this case Uh, they these students have spent 12 years learning how to work around a particular cognitive disability Successfully because they've made it into college Right. So that's the really surprising things that kind of challenged my own preconceptions about what a student with a learning disability really looks like Hmm I've got some thoughts on that, but we have another question that just came in This is from the excellent michael haggins We said what do you find existing physical classrooms to be a constraint? When you flip the course They can certainly be a major major constraint. Um, I spent my I mentioned my sabbatical a while ago I spent my sabbatical actually with steelcase incorporated, which is a a furniture manufacturer in here in grand rapids, michigan And a lot of people know them as like high-end office furniture, but they also have a very active and robust Education sector in the company. They do they do executive furniture health care furniture like Like waiting rooms and stuff like that and they also do education They designed active learning classrooms. And so I was working with them To do research on active learning and on active learning classrooms. And so to get back to the question Absolutely space can be a constraint. Uh, it's all about when you're doing a flipped Class the group space is all about activity. It's about getting students to do active learning And the space can totally constrain this and the first the the prototype example or the big lecture halls where the seats are bolded to the floor Okay, you you literally have to twist yourself Unnaturally to even turn around to talk with a neighbor if you're doing a think pair share activity I mean it's it's it's every aspect of that space is telling you not to be active It's telling you to have a seat face forward watch the middle-aged white dude on the stage and he's in charge Okay, as when you go into a classroom, it's more flexible Even if it's not a full-blown active learning classroom with really nice chairs and tables that have wheels on them and And you know portable white boards and scale-up room stuff If it's just a room where you can physically or easily pick up the tables and move them around you create more flow A physical flow flow of air flow of information flow of social interaction in that space and it It's sort of super chart as an amplifies the effects of the active learning That's what we found in the research that we did You can do active learning anytime any place But there are certain elements of the physical Architecture of the room that can serve as a damper and some that can serve as an amplifier I did a very cruel exercise to my To my students at Georgetown did I tell you this? We had a unit on mobile technology And I wanted to make sure that they would see just how strange and surprising mobile technology is In the classroom usually meets in a wonderful wonderful space with lots of very configurable furniture And we normally the students normally position it in all kinds of different ways So I made them put it into rows and I got a a podium for me to address the classroom with And the students started exerting they're expressing physical emotional pain in this process You know, they they couldn't watch each other and they got more and more anxious Quite quite an exercise before but I have to say we were done the last four minutes So does anybody have a last question that they would like to put to our very very kind guest? This is your time. So either click the raised hand or click the question mark to put that in All people are desperately trying to do that. Let me go more future-oriented question I think it was Kelly who Asked you about the future and you said that you saw continuing You actually use the term very precisely you said exponential increase in Do you think that You know, how far will this go and will the foot classroom become the normative classroom within say 10 years Well, I think if you look at the at the past 10 years The flip learning really began to pick up in the mid 2000s when uh, Aaron Bergman or Aaron sands and john Bergman wrote this book called flip your classroom Reach every student every day and every class or something that's supposed to subtitle anyways a seminal or game K-12 educators who started the k-12 level gradually sort of and percolated into higher ed I think that You will find more and more people venturing out into this direction of flip learning again Maybe not by name But by saying even just sort of coming to their own conclusions with discovering it on their own in some ways to say Look, I've got all these resources. Why am I lecturing so much? I mean lecturing is not necessarily a bad thing. It's not inherent evil But why am I doing it so much and our students really learning? I think that there's more and more pressure to sort of You know Put up or shut up when it comes to student learning in the university And we we need to be demonstrating that students are actually learning what they say that they're learning And so having more active learning in the classroom kind of makes that makes that uh much more visible I would say and the technological tools are better now than they've ever been They're only going to get better as I mean just look at the tool we're on right now I mean, uh, this would have been science fiction 10 years ago 10 years from now Who knows what it's going to be and so having this the ability to have students sort of work On their own effectively prior to a group meeting and then making the group meeting really really great I think that's going to be a very attractive prospect and much easier for the average rank and file faculty member to do And the easier the technology gets to use the more you're going to see this permeate into the mainstream. I would say Well, that's a key point. That's a lot of key point. Thank you. That's a very very positive look I like the idea of making this visible In a way that may also tie into our desire to improve reputation of learning. We do have one one last question from charles finley Fentany and he asks you talked about faculty perception How to change the way students define what learning is supposed to be Not unlike an essay final exam Right. Yeah, so charles. I have this I have my students do this exercise in the first day of class every year And it writes a touchstone for us to come back over and over again to it. I asked them two questions. I asked them Or this isn't a question but figure out something that you're good at doing What are you good at doing it can be school related? It can be not school related But just think about what you're good at doing and then share with each other at your tables for two months So they come up with i'm really good at snowboarding or i'm really good at baking cookies or whatever And then I come back to them and ask how did you get to be good at the thing that you say that you're good at doing How did you become a good snowboarder? How did you become a good baker? This isn't a new exercise. I stole it from somebody else, but I'll give them credit once I remember who it was and it's it's Of course, none of the students say well I had this great Lecturer on how to bake cookies or they might say I watched a youtube video Okay, that's that's a legit way to learn something But you really learn by actually trying to bake the cookies and actually getting on the snowboard falling on your face And getting back up and they'll come up with all the right answers like it's it takes practice But not just any kind of practice it takes mindful practice and it takes doing it takes failure And I tell them on day one It's like remember everything you're saying because I'm going to come back to this day day in and day out And I think that it becomes it's a messaging issue that we change the perception of what learning really is like It's not about my teaching. It's about your learning. Okay Are you learning the things that you're supposed to be learning in the course? And how do you know and how do you get there and learning calculus learning world history learning portuguese? It's like learning anything else. It takes it takes work. It takes effort It takes failure and it takes mindful correction of failures And it's no different than anything else you've ever learned in your life That's worth something. Okay, so anything meaningful in your life That's how it works and I aim to make this meaningful And you know, not all students are going to be convinced by that in the 14 weeks that I have them But of all the bet what I hope at least is that they're going to remember these conversations that I have with them About what learning really looks like. It's not an alien process. It's actually something we all do We've been doing it's a uniquely human gift that we have we've been doing it since we were infants Even before we were born here we're learning And we were doing it in a certain kind of way. We're still doing it in a certain kind of way Robert I love how how you started off with a very tactical question of student attitudes in a particular pedagogy and ended up by Easily able to speak about the fundamental nature of learning and humanity as a whole I hate to pause this but we we are out of crime Let me first of all, thank you so much For your your real generous time. I think this is fantastic. I really appreciate how you Engaged all of us and how you deeply answer our questions Um, what's the best way to keep up with your work? Is it a very twitter? Uh twitter is good. Uh, that's sort of at Robert Talbert on twitter Uh, you can go to my website at rtalbert.org and um, I kind of cross those two things up I'll tweet my blog post out sometimes. I'll blog about my tweets It's kind of weird, but uh, that's that uh, I'm also on linkedin or if you're ever in the west michigan area Feel free to just stop in I'll give you a tour of the math department But twitter and my website are probably the best ways to kind of Keep keep up with what i'm doing and of course your book Yes Thanks again And I really look forward to bringing you back next year once you've had a chance to overhaul grand valley state Just you know, I know no big no pressure or anything, right? Good luck and thank you again. Thank you, brian Friends don't leave because I have to tell you about what's happening for the next couple of weeks So, uh, and thank you by the way for so many of you, uh, michael or aksan and kelly for your really good questions Um, next week we're going to shift gears a little bit to talk about student needs Uh, this is a fantastic fantastic report done with just some groundbreaking research about how community colleges can best support their students So it looks at them as looks at students as social beings and And also how they can be served to the library in some really exciting ways So i'm really looking forward to having lisa blankstein On on the program Now if you would like to follow up with this session or with All any of our previous sessions just head to the archive at tony url.com slash f tf archive We've had previous sessions looking at The foot classroom the foot learning as well as many sessions on pedagogy technology and of course the future of the university If you'd like to keep this conversation going we have lots of ways of doing it We have groups on facebook and on linkedin We have a slack channel and the hashtag f t te is always buzzing on twitter We'd love to hear from you and in the meantime keep thinking about this flip your classrooms and uh, we'll see you next time Thanks again and take care