I’m going to try it out this spring with my Introduction to International Relations class. (I’ll also post my lectures online, which I believe will make mine the second Intro IR course available to the general public—though if you know of others, please provide links in the comments.) Have any of you tried it? If so, I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.
Below the fold are some thoughts on why I think it will help some students get more out of my class.
Giving students the ability to pause, rewind, and relisten... I talk fast (I sadly have but two modes: too fast and way too fast), and I teach technical material (I’ve always been of the mind that intro does not mean easy, only that the emphasis will be on breadth rather than depth.) I repeat myself a lot, and try to remember to slow down, but it’s still hard for some students to keep up.
…shorter and more focused lectures. Not only do I repeat myself a lot, but I spend a lot of time playing defense. Currently, I’d say I spend about a third of my time reminding students of what ground we’ve already covered (a must when algebra is involved) and acknowledging that my simplified models do in fact simplify reality. Some students, no doubt, appreciate hearing about the limitations of the models. But most of them tune out whenever they hear me say “of course, in reality…,” since they know that I’m basically going to babble for a few minutes before concluding, “…but if we accounted for that in the model, we’d get the same results, only with much uglier math, and then you’d all hate me even more.” Unfortunately, if I don’t include these auditory footnotes, it’s almost guaranteed that some sniper will raise their hand and try to prove how smart they are to their classmates by pointing out that the professor has made an assumption. My guess is that most of these questions will go away once I cease lecturing in front of a live audience. And those that do get asked under the new format are likely to be asked out of genuine curiosity, rather than a desire to look smart.
More in-class experiments. I’ve gone back and forth on incorporating these over the years. I’ve designed a few that I think work well, but students never seem to take them seriously. They see them as play time. Which was reasonable enough, I suppose, since in the past I tried to create stakes through extra credit or soda and cookies. There was never much of a downside to sub-optimal play. This semester, I’ve tried creating real incentives by basing 10% of their grade on the amount of points they earn throughout the semester. That hasn’t worked quite as well as I’ve hoped, but I do see a difference. Next semester, I’m going to base 50% of their grade on in-class experiments, of which there will be far more once I free up all that class time. Hopefully, this will also give the students a real incentive to stay current with the online lectures, since it will be very hard to know what strategies will perform best in the experiments otherwise.
Other benefits I’m overlooking? Downsides, besides the time it will take to re-prep the class? Suggestions on how to make it all work?
At 50% aren’t you basically grading their negotiation skills and not knowledge of the material?
The experiments are structured to exactly mirror the theoretical models I lecture about. I wouldn’t say that their negotiation skills are the main thing that’s being rewarded by them, no. In the current class, those who have done well on exams and written assignments have done much better in the experiments than those who have done poorly on the other assignments, so I feel pretty confident that it’s mostly about knowledge of the material.
I have been really interested in the idea of flipping my IR courses lately. I like to use simulations, but I have found that teaching one meeting and simulating the next halves the amount of material that can be covered. I’m interested in hearing more on your experiments. Could you offer some examples?
Sure. After lecturing about bargaining, I use the following two experiments, back to back.
Some students proved they haven’t understood (or even heard) a thing I said in the past few weeks, announcing that they thought the best strategy was to “go big or go home” and demand all my points, but a good number of them figured out the optimal strategy (ask for 5 points in the first case and 15 in the second), and did so by flipping back through their notes from the previous lectures. (I apologize they’re appearing out of order. I can’t get disqus to cooperate with me on that.)
Last year, I flipped the classroom in my first year seminar (21 students) on introducing students to some social science theories and concepts for explaining cooperation and conflict in Canada and elsewhere. I blogged about it and you can find those blog entries here:
https://www.lispop.ca/blog/2012/12/11/my-final-verdict-on-the-flipped-classroom/
The results were pretty amazing. Almost perfect attendance each week (e.g. only 1 student missing sometimes) whereas my colleagues were bleeding half their students. Full engagement for the three hours, whereas usually in my seminars, the students and I want to leave by the second hour! And high quality discussion, equal and surpassing the discussions that occur at the M.A. level.
I was hoping to flip my second year intro to Canadian politics course this year (enrollment of 125) but my summer got filled with research so I had to compromise ( by using learning catalytics). But I am flipping one unit this term. The details and lesson plan are here:
https://www.lispop.ca/blog/2013/10/10/flipped-classroom-a-lesson-plan-for-2nd-year-intro-to-canadian-politics/
Having done the flipped classroom, I can’t imagine going back to the standard lecture or seminar. At a minimum, all of my courses are going to use this learning catalytics stuff. Ideally, I plan to flip all of my graduate and undergraduate courses!
In terms of suggestions:
1) Make sure you have an online quiz that students must complete before class on the readings and videos. The quiz provides an incentive for students to read and watch the videos. More importantly, it gives the instructor a sense of what the students learned and what they didn’t. That way, you can take that information and begin class with a SHORT (maximum 10-15 minute) lecture going over the material that they struggled with. Then, the rest of the class is application in small groups (e.g. discussions; problem solving; simulations; short videos; games, etc). The instructor needs to pay attention to the quality of the in-class output and to end the class with a short (maximum 5 minute) lecture that goes over anything that seems to have been problematic during the in-class work.
Otherwise, there’s a lot of freedom to do what you want! And the great thing about flipped classroom is you get instant feedback every week on what students have learned or not. Beats waiting until the midterm and final exam when it’s too late!
Thanks, Chris. This is very helpful and encouraging.
This is really intresting and I have a question. Given that you now have student watch your lectures before coming to class, do you reduce the readings they have to do? I.e. will students have to spend more time on your class than with the traditional way of doing things? This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I am wondering what the implications would be if students signed up for four or five such classes.
Good point. I won’t be assigning any readings, so I don’t think students will have have to spend more time on my class than they would comparable classes taught in the traditional format. But that would definitely be a concern if so.