Flipped futures

“Flipped learning has really captured people’s imaginations,” says Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Interactive Media Peter Kandlbinder. “It’s something academics want to find out more about and be involved in.”

Flipped learning is a shift from traditional approaches in that it encourages students to engage with materials covering basic concepts before class. Valuable face-to-face time with academics is then used to tackle higher level tasks like project-based inquiry and collaborative problem-solving. The approach promotes active learning, offering students a deeper understanding of the subject.

It’s also an opportunity to harness the possibilities offered by the array of new learning spaces and technologies coming online across the campus. But for academics, developing and integrating activities that make best use of the flipped approach can involve some trial and error.

UTS’s Flipped Learning Action Group (FLAG) is a new learning community providing a supportive forum where academics can share ideas, resources and experiences about flipping their classrooms.

Jenny Pizzica and Peter Kandlbinder at the Learning2014 Festival. Photographer: Hannah Jenkins

“Academics were already meeting to discuss flipped learning last year,” explains Lecturer and FLAG co-convenor Jenny Pizzica. “The community received a little funding to help facilitate these sessions through the Learning2014 initiative, which is how FLAG got started.”

Pizzica works with fellow FLAG co-convenor Kandlbinder to coordinate the monthly meetings where academics discuss strategies to engage students, explore new technology like video-editing software and ask questions of experts.

“We run group activities and generate ideas about what the community would like to learn,” says Pizzica. “Academics often have questions like, ‘How do you engage students in flipped learning?’ or, ‘How do we best evaluate flipped learning?’. So we look at running further sessions to explore the answers to questions that come up.”

FLAG is open to all UTS academics who want to learn more about flipped learning. The program includes talks from external experts, workshops in new teaching spaces, training sessions with new technology and the occasional mini grant awarded to academics to implement new projects.

Momentum in the group is gaining, thanks to the project-based approach. The FLAG community decides which projects are most viable and academics are encouraged to put them in to practise, which in turn generates valuable case studies for other members of FLAG to review and adapt to their own context.

Senior Lecturer and Learning2014 Fellow Anne Gardner is part of the FLAG community. As the subject coordinator of a compulsory first-year engineering subject, Gardner wanted to invigorate the course and help students on their path as developing professionals.

“I was looking for something that would get me away from the front of the classroom,” says Gardner. “Flipping gave me the opportunity to approximate the feeling of working in a small group, but with a very large lecture theatre.”

Gardner has successfully used video content and short recorded lectures to engage students before they enter the classroom. “If they prepare before class, we don’t have to cover the ideas everyone understands when we all come together. We can go straight to the stuff students are having problems with – usually the areas that integrate a few topics together – and look at more real-world problems.

“I don’t think students ever really learnt well in lecture theatres,” she says. “‘Doing’ is so much better than ‘telling’. And when you go to work, the problems don’t come to you neatly explained and packaged with all the data lined up; flipping creates a far more realistic system.”

Health lecturers Allison Cummins, Rosemarie Hogan and Fiona Orr have also used flipped learning to prepare students for the realities of the workplace.

They observed that nursing and midwifery students returning from clinical placements at times reported negative experiences dealing with patients and registered hospital staff, saying they felt ill-equipped to handle unpleasant and difficult workplace experiences.

“We needed to work with our students to facilitate building resilience when faced with challenging situations,” says Cummins.

The three academics recently completed a trial semester using videos and role-playing in the classroom to build students’ skills and resilience in clinical settings.

The videos depict scenarios where students might become stressed or overwhelmed, incorporating alternative endings where the best and worst outcomes are shown. Students watch the videos in their own time and are then encouraged to work through a set of questions before participating in in-depth role-play during class.

“Role-playing rather than just talking about these issues is vital,” says Cummins. “Using a combination of multimedia and face-to-face debriefing with the students to explore challenging ideas and scenarios is non-traditional but it’s effective.”

While much of the flipped learning at UTS focuses on making use of the new learning environments being delivered by the City Campus Master Plan, Senior Lecturer in the School of the Built Environment Pernille Christensen is using new technologies to capture and preserve content currently offered through traditional lectures. 

Christensen is one of the most recent beneficiaries of a small FLAG grant to help bring flipped learning to her core foundational postgraduate subjects – and time is of the essence.

“We’re really fortunate to have some amazing guest speakers in these subjects,” she explains. “Some of these people are the best in their field but several are preparing to retire.  They bring such a valuable breadth and depth of information that will be hard to replace.

“I plan to create mini lectures to capture topics guest speakers would normally present to students. This way we can create an online library of information that’s not likely to change significantly, and supplement that with practical exercises and presentations on current developments in class.”

Photographer: Anna Zhu

The ease with which academics can now produce multimedia content is something Kandlbinder believes has made flipped learning so accessible. “Anyone can produce a little video or an audio podcast now; the technical barrier is reduced, so it’s opened up possibilities.”

Students are also far more likely to have ubiquitous access to materials through their own mobile devices. But it’s not just about creating online resources and leaving students to work it out.

“We have to think about integrating new technology with the activities to be done in class and then embedding the assessment in that,” says Gardner. “If it’s not integrated, it’s not going to achieve what flipped learning aims to do.”

Developing integrated strategies with flipped learning is a work-in-progress for most classrooms, and engaging with the FLAG community gives academics the chance to test their ideas and share exciting solutions.

“We hope FLAG empowers and encourages academics to go off in new directions and learn new things,” says Kandlbinder.