To put this implementation of the flipped course in perspective, it will be necessary to describe the organic chemistry courses at IPFW before fall 2013. A traditional lecture course may be considered to consist of the following sequence of events before, during, and after class. The students are assigned a reading from the text to complete before the class meeting. In class, the instructor lectures on the topics and assigns homework questions afterwards. Students alone or in groups work on the homework and may ask the instructor questions about the material before the next meeting. If some type of CAT is not used during lecture, student problems with the material are not recognized until a quiz or exam. In practice many faculty conduct classes that are not just traditional lecture. They incorporate active learning to greater or lesser degrees. Active learning was used in the organic sequence at IPFW prior to fall 2013.
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The impact of the flipped organic sequence was examined by comparing it to the same sequence over the previous 2 academic years. The course topics were essentially the same. The final exam for the 2ndsemester courses was the ACS Form 2004 Organic Chemistry Exam. The class sizes were similar. In each course, the class met three times a week for 50 min. For the two years prior to the complete flip, the course was not a simple traditional lecture. Students were given assigned readings. In the face-to-face class, the same topics were described in a lecture format. The lecture notes were provided as PowerPoint files for the students to print beforehand. In nearly each face-to-face meeting, questions were posed for all students to answer to assess their understanding of concepts just presented. A classroom response system (clickers) was used so that all students would answer. Best practices suggested for clicker use were employed (12). With each question, the students were given time to discuss their answers in informal groups before entering a response. On average, 3 questions were posed each day. The number and length of the questions varied with the material. All class meetings were recorded with a lecture capture program for subsequent review by the students online. Beyond that, optional review sessions were offered to the students twice weekly. IPFW doesn’t provide for recitation sections. Although rarely more than half the class attended these optional review sessions, significant numbers of students did show up regularly. These sessions involved an hour of group problem solving. Online homework was assigned after the lecture. Besides the extensive use of CATs, the flipped pedagogy had been piloted in both courses with nomenclature topics. At appropriate points, students were asked to watch lecture capture videos covering nomenclature. Upon arrival, they took a short quiz to demonstrate that they had learned the basics from the videos. Once the quizzes were handed in, more challenging nomenclature problems were covered as group problem solving clicker questions. These pilots of the flipped pedagogy were positive indicators that the flipping could be extended to the entire course.
Beginning in fall 2013, the sequence was completely flipped. All lecture content was placed online as videos to be viewed outside of the class. A substantial portion of the problems covered in the homework and review sessions were moved into the class periods for group problem solving.
In preparation for the courses, videos of the lectures were recorded. These videos were created with the same lecture capture program which recorded both the instructor and whatever was on the computer screen such as PowerPoint slides.
Instead of 50 minute lectures, nearly all of the videos were less than 20 minutes.
Some were as short as 1.5 min. The length of the video was dictated by the time it took to explain a single topic or concept. This choice was based on the method known as chunking (13). Reducing the material into manageable pieces helps students process the material. The lecture content was otherwise largely the same as those given over the previous two years. The same PowerPoint notes were used. They were merely broken up into smaller files to match the online video content. For the entire sequence, 295 videos were prepared: 130 for the Organic I semester and 165 for Organic II. Despite the difference in number, approximately 17 h of lecture was recorded for each semester. This low total was surprising. With each class having a length of 50 minutes, 17 h corresponds to 20.4 classes. Each semester is 15 weeks long with 3 classes per week giving a total of 45 classes.
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Subtracting 5 class meetings for exams and quizzes, there should have been 40 classes. Yet the videos amounted to only 20.4. Although some time would have been taken up with announcements and student questions, it wouldn’t account for 23.6 classes. The bulk of this missing class time time had been spent in group problem solving instead of lecture. The organic courses prior to fall 2013 already involved a significant amount of active learning rather than lecture.
An important component to flipping the course was to prepare the students for the new format. A complete description of the format, student expectations, and rationale was placed in the syllabus. In particular, it was stated that there was a significant amount of evidence supporting the use of active learning and that it should benefit them in increased learning and improved grades. The first class began with a review of general chemistry. The students were asked clicker questions to determine what they had retained. They were expected to watch videos after that.
For a typical class, the students were asked to watch a number of videos and read the corresponding material in the text. The assigned videos corresponded to the topics planned for the upcoming class. The PowerPoint slides used in each video were made available to the students online for subsequent study. To ensure that they had prepared, the students were asked to complete an online homework assignment before class. These questions were relatively simple and used to assess their readiness for more complex problems. For Organic I, 162 homework questions were written while 98 were prepared for Organic II. These question types were those commonly available in learning management systems rather than chemistry-specific questions that involve students drawing structures.
Commercial online homework products were not found to be suitable since the questions needed to be directed at specific planned activities in the face-to-face meeting. The software and site for the recorded videos does allow the instructor to view whether students had accessed the videos and how many times. A range of activity was observed. Some accessed the videos numerous times; some didn’t view the videos at all.
During class, the entire time was devoted to group problem solving using questions modified from the text and review sessions from previous years.
Initially a review of the assigned topics was provided at the beginning of that day before the planned CATs. It rapidly became apparent that the students didn’t need or want it. They wanted to get to answering questions and solving problems.
Many of the questions were short and it was possible to work through 10 to 12 clicker questions per class meeting. The time spent per question varied with their content and type. Ruder has provided a useful resource for clicker questions to use in organic (14). The individual questions used for Organic I and Organic II at IPFW can be accessed at http://organicers.org (15). Typically, the questions were displayed on a PowerPoint slide to the students. After students took time to briefly discuss the problem, they entered their answers using their clickers.
Multiple choice, numerical, and text question formats were used. The entire PowerPoint file without answers was provided online at least one day before class. The students were allowed to use any resource such as the text, notes and any device to access information. Some students printed out the questions while others accessed them with their cellphones and tablets.
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Although most questions were answered quickly, more in depth problems were given. For example, for spectroscopy, the students were given the molecular formula and IR,1H NMR, and13C NMR spectra for a compound. They were asked to draw the structure for the compound. The correct structure and the four most common incorrect structures were placed on the board. The students then voted on the one they thought was correct. Such polling could be used after students are asked to draw transition states, conformations, and reactive intermediates in a mechanism. For synthesis, the students were given a table of 10 to 15 reagents.
Each reagent was given a number. They were then asked to propose a synthesis for a compound from a given starting material. Once they had finished, they entered the correct order of reagents in the synthesis as a sequence of numbers. Such problems could take 10 to 20 minutes of class time.
Flipped courses were designed to be time neutral. The time that the students were expected to spend on a traditional course or a flipped course per week was to be the same. The amount of time that should have been spent on attending lectures, reading the text, completing homework, studying notes, etc. was estimated for the previous courses. Then the flipped class activities were designed so that the same amount of time would be spent in the new course format. In effect the time and location of course activities were shifted and not increased or decreased for the flipped courses. The students were expected to spend 12 h on organic chemistry per week: 3 in the classroom and 9 outside. As in the past, it appeared that some did more and some less.
Grading for the organic sequence was kept largely the same. The same schedule of exams and quizzes was used. The pace of the courses were similar so that much of the same material was covered on each exam. For all three years the ACS Form 2004 Organic Chemistry Exam was used as the final for the 2nd semester. The grading between the flipped and previous courses was nearly the same. See Tables 1 and 2 which outline the grading for Organic 1 and 2 courses.
They show the total number of points a student could achieve in a semester and what each assessment was worth. For each course, two 50 min. exams worth 100 pt. (200 pt. total) and four 25 pt. quizzes (100 pt. total) counted towards their final grade. The students actually took three exams and five quizzes with the lowest grade of each being dropped. The online homework was worth 50 points whether it was post class before the transformation or pre-class after the complete flip. Two assessments, clicker questions and nomenclature quizzes require further explanation. In all three years, students were assigned points for participating in group problem solving and individually answering with their clickers. Points were only assigned for answering and not for being correct. One concern that could be raised is that students were potentially given points for random answers without any attempt to actually work the problems. Although there was no apparent evidence of this behavior, the more plausible scenario is that students would answer whatever the “A” student nearby chose. Assigning points for correct answers would not have prevented students from answering in this manner. With the policy, group problem solving became formative assessments for the students and instructor where misconceptions could be addressed without the pressure of these activities affecting their grades adversely.
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Table 1. Grading for the Organic Chemistry I Courses
Year Quizzes Nomenclature Quizzes
Exams Final Exam
Clicker Homework Total
2013 (flipped)
100a 0 200 150 50 50 550
2012 100 25 200 150 25 50 550
2011 100 25 200 150 25 50 550
aAll numbers besides those for years represent points towards the course total.
Table 2. Grading for the Organic Chemistry II Courses
Year Quizzes Nomenclature Quizzes
Exams Final Exam
Clicker Homework Total
2014 (flipped)
100a 0 200 200 50 50 600
2013 100 25 200 200 25 50 600
2012 100 25 200 200 25 50 600
aAll numbers besides those for years represent points towards the course total.
The nomenclature quizzes previously mentioned for the courses prior to fall 2013 were worth a total of 25 points. Upon transforming the course, it was more consistent to treat the nomenclature topics in the same manner as the rest of the course. Also, it was deemed better to use the class time for more active learning instead of short quizzes. The nomenclature quizzes were no longer given and 25 more points were added to clicker total. It may seem that these points should have been added to the homework total. Instead they were added to the clicker total since the students were doing significantly more group work. Assigning a significant amount of points to these activities helps to convince students of their importance. Somewhat surprisingly, the nomenclature plus clicker point total scores were comparable to the clicker point score of the flipped classes.