My Flippin' Experience: Lessons for Tutors
Getting every student engaged in the material, in every class for the whole class is a holy grail for educators. As potentially impossible a task as this might be for adult students with a myriad of distractions and responsibilities, it is still a worthy goal.
With that goal in mind, a flipped classroom model was introduced in two level 5 courses in the Marine Science program over a two year time frame, and the students surveyed about their experience with the associated videos, classroom experience, and assessment of knowledge gained within the courses.
Their mean scores were compared to past cohorts in order to gauge whether the flipped model affected success rates. Overall success was higher (p=0.0009) as measured by mean scores which went up 4.1 percentage points in years with flipped delivery compared to years with primarily lecture delivery.
Students’ feedback was varied as to how well they liked or how often they accessed the videos in preparation for class, ranging from strongly disliking the structure, to thriving within it. As has been noted many times there is no one delivery that will suit every type of learner, but the flipped model has increased success in these courses.
The most important lessons learned from this project were
- that the increased group activities contributed to class cohesion, and encouraged a greater sense of whanau
- that students prefer videos of fairly short duration