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Looking for ‘Flippable’ Moments in Your Class

“How do you determine what can be flipped?”

With all of this discussion around flipped classrooms, more instructors are asking this question and wondering when and where flipped strategies are best integrated into the learning environment. Certainly, some topics lend themselves more easily to flipped strategies than others, but every lesson plan has the opportunity for at least one “flippable moment.” This is the moment during class when you stop talking at your students and “flip” the work to them instead. This is the moment when you allow your students to struggle, ask questions, solve problems, and do the “heavy lifting” required to learn the material.

Barbi Honeycutt, PhD March 25, 2013

Managing Controversy in the Online Classroom

Controversy can erupt in any learning situation, and knowing how to manage it is an important skill for any instructor. Online instructors need to be aware of the following challenges when it comes to managing controversy:

Rob Kelly March 19, 2013

Millennial Students and Middle-aged Faculty: A Learner-centered Approach toward Bridging the Gap

The problem is my age. It relentlessly advances while the faces staring back at me in the classroom remain the same, fixed between late adolescence and early adulthood. In short, I grow old while my students do not. And the increasing gap between our ages causes me some concern, pedagogically speaking.

Joan Flaherty March 18, 2013

Seven Steps to Creating Screencast Videos for Online Learning

When I first started teaching online, one of the most frustrating aspects was that I did not have access to an old-fashioned blackboard to give students a visual map of what I was teaching. I felt restricted by the text-based instruction of the discussion board and eventually began creating colorful flowcharts to teach essay structure, for example, or PowerPoint slides to explain the MLA style format.

Yvonne Ho March 15, 2013

Designing and Teaching Online Courses with Adult Students in Mind

Many of the learners in today’s online courses are adults who are returning to school to upgrade their qualifications. It’s worth considering what kinds of adult students are in your courses and what their needs are.

Patti Shank PhD CPT March 14, 2013

The ‘I Deserve a Better Grade on This’ Conversation

It’s a conversation most faculty would rather not have. The student is unhappy about a grade on a paper, project, exam, or for the course itself. It’s also a conversation most students would rather not have. In the study referenced below, only 16.8 percent of students who reported they had received a grade other than what they thought their work deserved actually went to see the professor to discuss the grade.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD March 12, 2013

Better Research Basics, One Sentence at a Time

Breathes there a professor of any subject with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, “Today’s undergraduates are hopeless at research!” (apologies to Sir Walter Scott). It is easy to blame high schools or freshman English classes, but that doesn’t fix our problem. As a frustrated educator of future teachers (Clouse) and a 20-year veteran of teaching college writing and research (Nelson), we obviously sympathize and often feel blamed. We have found that a better approach is an interdisciplinary effort that gives students ample opportunities to practice and develop their writing and research skills. The cumulative effect of this approach not only benefits faculty, but our students seem to appreciate and feel less intimidated working within this method as well.

Barbara Barney Nelson, PhD, and Scarlet Clouse March 11, 2013

Classroom Management: Finding the Balance Between Too Rigid and Too Flexible

For quite some time now I’ve been interested in a widely held set of assumptions faculty make about the need to assert control at the beginning of a course. The argument goes something like this: When a course starts, the teacher needs to set the rules and clearly establish who’s in charge. If the course goes well, meaning students abide by the rules and do not challenge the teacher’s authority, then the teacher can gradually ease up and be a bit looser about the rules. The rationale behind this approach rests on the assumption that if a teacher loses control of a class, it is very hard to regain the upper hand. In these cases, student behaviors have compromised the climate for learning so seriously that the teacher has an ethical responsibility to intervene and reassert control.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD March 8, 2013

Three Ways to Change up Your Online Discussion Board Prompts

Are you having trouble getting students to participate in online discussions? Consider using other types of prompts in addition to the typical open-ended question. Maria Ammar, assistant English professor at Frederick Community College, uses the following prompts in her English as a second language course and recommends them for other types of courses:

Rob Kelly March 7, 2013

Test Review Sessions: A Better Design

Terence Favero begins where many teachers are with respect to review sessions. Students request them. Teachers don’t like to give up class time to essentially go over material they’ve already covered. It’s difficult to find a time that works for everyone—students don’t want to come in early, and professors don’t want to review at bedtime. Then there’s the issue of who shows up for the review session. Usually, it’s not the students who most need to be there. And finally, there’s how review sessions are generally structured. Students ask questions, which the professor answers, while the students take notes. Favero notes, “Rarely does this approach lead to deep learning or prepare students for an exam.” (p. 247)

Maryellen Weimer, PhD March 5, 2013

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