Flipped teaching


This is when you give students the lecture to read, or watch as a video, in advance (‘homework’) and then use your class time to work through problems (or perhaps cases, in the case of medicine), answer questions.  Nicely explained from a High School example on the video below, or in more detail here at geekdad (wired.com).

Should we be doing more of this in medical education?


9 responses to “Flipped teaching”

  1. This sounds similar to Eric Mazur’s “Peer Instruction” or “Just-in-time Teaching” methods. I have incorporated aspects of both into a couple of my Clinical Educator Programme workshops and I am hoping that Prof Mazur himself will be coming to speak at the Medical School in November, either as a keynote speaker for the Winter SEFCE Symposium, or as a guest speaker on the CEP.

  2. This is the standard approach to teaching used in the MSc Clinical Education. Each week students review pre-recorded lectures and then attend a live video tutorial to discuss what they have learned, and very often also discuss how they have already applied it to their own practice since they saw the lectures. We use Adobe Connect software, which is also available for any MBChB teaching or staff development. LTS now has a recording studio at George Square and are happy to help anyone who wants to make pre-recorded lectures or other content.

  3. Should it be a lecture though? We know that after 30 minutes of a lecture most people are not absorbing much anymore, does that get worse or better if they are listening to a lecture at home with nobody else around them (perhaps to give them a nudge if they drift off!)?
    I guess taking the lecture out of the lecture theatre and onto the computer allows it to become a very different experience and perhaps we should take advantage of that.

    • Should it be a lecture – good Q – I don’t think it always should. Lectures are hard to look up specific things in, or to revise from. Plus there’s the attention span issue. There’s a lot to be said for words and pictures – even books sometimes?

  4. Who chooses the faces? Does it reflect anything about us at all?!! If so, then why is my tongue hanging out?

  5. Michael, who is the best person to contact about getting training for using the recording studio at George Sq?

  6. Hi Debbie, I would be happy to assist with training on using Adobe Presenter to record lectures. Just drop me an email (jo.spiller@ed.ac.uk) and we can arrange a suitable time for you to come by.

    Ed, Adobe Presenter also allows you to insert interactivity into your presentation, i.e. with MCQ, short answer, fill-in-the-blank questions etc. You can choose whether to allow viewers to skip these interactions or whether they are required to respond before continuing with the presentation. That way, the online presentation can be more engaging and it can also be a good starting point for the follow up tutorial. We also have Camtasia which is a tool that enable you to record your screen activity (so not just your Powerpoint slides) which recording narrative to it.

    Very happy to show anyone how to use these tools who are interested.

  7. In response to Ed’s comment above, I’d like to support the online lecture as a format that suits some people very well. Of course if we were to move to the Flipped Classroom and contain the time required from teaching staff, it seems very sensible to ask students to read specified texts rather than rely on in-house lectures and CALs, to prepare for large group sessions, and problem solving in teams (see separate posts on Team Based Learning). However unlike lectures in a hall, the great advantage of online lectures is the way you can control their rate, stop, start and rewind – and fetch a cup of tea when the going gets tough. I’m currently undertaking a course through Corsera and at least some of their online lectures are talks to camera with a huge data screen beside with the slides – all very engaging.

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