I absolutely love the summer – and not just because I live in Michigan and hate winter.  In addition to sunshine and warmer temperatures, this is a time for introspection and reflection.  As an academic, my reflection tends to center on evaluation and assessment of what worked well and what didn’t in the classes I teach.  One of my primary responsibilities on campus is coordination of our first-year transition course UNIV 101.  This course focuses on helping students develop a metacognitive approach to their learning with a focus on strengthening critical thinking skills and utilizing reflective practice to achieve subject mastery.

There is a considerable body of work examining first-year experience courses and student success.  We know that one of the keys to successful first-year programs involves the development of community in the classroom. UNIV instructors do a really good job of building community in their classrooms.  This focus on community supports for more open conversations in the classroom and willingness to take risks.  One of  the challenges for instructors teaching this course is to adequately cover all of the course content in meaningful ways that are relevant to the student so that they are actually learning.  To enhance student learning, I decided to “flip” my UNIV classroom this year.

(I began this post in June and then started to actually work on “flipping”.  Flash forward to December…)

In hind-site I can say that flipping the classroom is a bold undertaking. It took me an entire summer working on this project nearly every day to create an online course shell that was both engaging and supported learning. The challenge was that I wanted to create quality online content and lessons for my students.  To cover the entire semester, I had to create 26 learning modules from the ground up. Fortunately, there is already a large body of quality digital content that I was able to easily embed in my course shell. Unfortunately, there is an equally large body of really bad digital content out there that you have to sift through to find the gems. As the saying goes, to find Prince Charming you have to kiss a few frogs……

So, here is a rundown I thought I would share about what I learned while re-designing my course:

• The key to embarking on a  redesign project like this is to have a REALLY good curriculum map. Being able to map everything out on a grid before I started working on the redesign really helped me stay focused as I was working on the modules.
• As I mentioned above, there is an abundance of digital content out there – make sure that the digital content you are using is engaging and useful. This means that you have to watch ALL of any video you choose to add to your online course….I wasn’t willing to add anything to my course shell that I hadn’t previewed completely.
• I found many really good Ted Talks that I used in my course shell.  The nice thing about these videos is that they are the perfect length for an online lecture. Most of the one’s I used were10 – 15 minutes in length. I supplemented many of these videos witch shorter 3 – 5 minute clips that help to provide additional perspective on the topic. When I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for, I created my own PowerPoint voiceover videos using Screencast-o-matic (see my previous post) – an online tool that allows you to create short (15 minutes or less) videos.  The tool is free to educators and worked quite nicely for what I needed to do.  This isa video I created on the fly a week ago. I’ll be revising it for next year. I’ve included it here so that you can see what a Screencast-o-matic video looks like.
• For some modules, I had a hard time limiting the number of videos I included.  Knowing that students would likely only complete the online portion of the class if I kept the video content under 30 minutes, I found I wasn’t able to use many of the videos I thought would be engaging and which provided great perspective on a particular topic.  I decided to add Padlets (see my previous post about this tool) for each module with “additional resources” on that particular topic. This gave the students a unique opportunity to dig deeper into topics that interested them.  It also allowed them the opportunity to add videos they liked and thought would be useful for other students.

  

It’s now December and we have just completed finals.  I’ve made notes all semester related to the modules that worked well and the one’s that didn’t. I don’t teach as many classes in winter, so I’ll be spending more time “tweaking” my online course shell for next fall.  This was a huge endeavor – thus the 6 month gap in blog updates.  However, I’m so glad that I took the time to do this as nearly ALL of my face-to-face time with my students was spent in discussion or active learning exercises where students applied what they had learned through the reading and online course shell.  I’ll talk more about this aspect of course re-design in a separate post.