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I’ve put up a few posts and several comments about the inverted classroom this week. A lot of that is because the second iteration of the
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I’ve put up a few posts and several comments about the inverted classroom this week. A lot of that is because the second iteration of the MATLAB course is coming around at the beginning of February (we have a January term, so spring classes start a little late for us) and that’s done entirely in “inverted” mode. There were a lot of comments in this post about the inverted classroom, and based on some of those comments as well as some questions I got at my Joint Meetings talk on this subject, I thought I’d say a little about how, exactly, this instructional method gets implemented on a day-to-day basis in the MATLAB course.
The MATLAB course meets once a week (Wednesdays) for 75 minutes. This sets up a once-per-week workflow that repeats itself every Wednesday. Here’s how it will go:
This cycle is a bit different than what I started with last year, when I first ran the course. The in-class problem sets were supposed to be completely done by the end of class; that turned out to be ridiculously unrealistic. I let students turn in the finished products after 48 hours, which was nice for them except that some teams wouldn’t get far on anything during the meetings, intending to do it all outside of class, which then led to having to finish the week’s lab on top of the next week’s out-of-class assignments. To keep traffic moving better, I’m insisting this year that students turn in a reasonably complete rough draft by the end of the hour (I’ll have a rubric for that later) and then the whole thing before Thursday is done; at which point they should have no leftover work competing with the outside viewing and practice.
Also, the names have changed. Last year it was “homework"; this year it’s “guided practice” to emphasize that the exercises are intended to provide, well, guidance and practice. Last year it was “labs"; this year it’s “in-class problem sets” because there are significant differences between these problem sets and actual labs that science classes use. Last year it was videos; this year it’s “lectures”, to emphasize that it’s not the case that there is no lecturing taking place. Words mean a lot.
I estimate that students will spend no more than 1 hour a week watching video lectures; between 1 and 2 hours a week working through the guided practice; and maybe 1 hour a week in a combination of reviewing old work, coming to office hours, reading and contributing to online discussions, and other class-related tasks. That’s about 3 hours a week, which is pretty typical for a 1-credit class that meets 75 minutes a week, and it’s even better when you consider the inverted model specifically relegates the least cognitively complex tasks to outside of class.
The number-one student complaint I heard last year was that, far from occupying 3 or fewer hours a week of time, it was taking 6, 8, 10 or even more hours a week to complete the out-of-class tasks. That concerns me greatly. Every now and then in any class you’ll have to spend more than the usual “3 hours of work for each hour in class” conversion formula. But if students are spending more than that much on a regular basis, I would want to see what they are doing. There’s no way what I am assigning will take that long, no matter what your background competency or comfort level or what-have-you are, unless there is some serious inefficiency happening in how the work is being done. That concern is manageable if addressed.
Your thoughts?
