Partial Flipping in Practice: Case Studies
1. Supporting the Teaching of a Foundation Year Chemistry Course
confidence, with the marks being reported to the virtual learning environment (VLE) in order that they could make a summative contribution to the module’s assessment. Usage of resources was high, with the key outcome being that students who didn’t have prior knowledge of chemistry quickly caught up with those who had some experience of the subject, which contrasted with the situation observed in previous years. The success of this approach provided inspiration for the design and implementation of a partial flipping approach at the University of Southampton.
The combination of pre-lecture resources with interactive in-class activities is consistent with Bergmann & Sams’ model of flipped learning (26) whereby students acquire content knowledge out of class and then undertake activities in which they apply this knowledge during scheduled teaching time. Such an approach is becoming increasingly popular in chemistry and has been successfully applied in all areas of the subject (33). Of particular relevance to the second case study is work done on the application of flipped learning to organic chemistry teaching in separate studies by Christiansen (34) and Flynn (35). Eichler and Peeples have recently reported that the use of the flipped classroom model in the teaching of a general chemistry course genuinely leads an improved grade point average (36), and it is clear that this will be an area of great interest to chemistry educators and education researchers for a long time to come.
question or to elicit discussion in a manner inspired by the Socratic Method, as discussed previously in a chemistry context by Heeren (38) and Holme (39).
It had been the intention that clickers would be used in the majority of lectures during 2012/13 to test understanding and support learning by facilitating feedback provision. However, the pressures of content delivery meant that there simply wasn’t ample time during lecture slots for clickers to be used, much to the disappointment of the students who found them to be engaging and effective on the small number of occasions that they were deployed. In module evaluations, some students were vocal in requesting more interactivity in lectures, and this provided motivation to seek innovative ways of accommodating this request.
There was little scope for reducing the content covered in the chemistry module, bearing in mind that its purpose is to ensure that students who complete the foundation year have comparable levels of knowledge and understanding to those who have studied A-level chemistry, so an alternative approach was required if more interactivity and variety were to be introduced into lectures.
All of the 66 lectures had been recorded over the course of 2012/13, providing a total of 60 hours of content. With 36 students in the program, they streamed a total of around 1200 hours, revealing that they used the resources heavily.
Additionally, many students commented on the value of these recordings in supporting their independent study. As it had already been seen that students would make extensive use of recorded lectures, it was postulated that a short section of a lecture could be made available to students prior to the timetabled slot in a partial flipping approach, freeing up time for more effective learning activities. This process is illustrated in Figure 1, where an interactive segment is shown at the beginning of a lecture slot. Of course, this could be placed at any point in the timetabled slot, or the interactive elements can be broken down and interspersed amongst the rest of the material being delivered. The key point is that the entire lecture slot is no longer committed to entirely to content delivery, thus allowing the integration of active learning approaches which encourage more effective learning (18).
Figure 1. Freeing up time in a lecture slot by moving some content online 62
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Methodology
Since our early work on lecture recording at Southampton in 2009/10 (27), the lecture capure system, Panopto (40) has been adopted at the institution. This was used to capture all of the lectures in the Fundamentals of Chemistry module during the first year of delivery, and the availability of these recordings meant that there was an option to edit these and use them as part of a flipped learning project. However, it was decided that these ‘live’ recordings, with the voices of the previous year’s students clearly audible in their responses to questions and other discussions, were not appropriate for this purpose. Instead, it was decided that pre-lecture videos would be recorded afresh.
The typical format for pre-lectures was that the first 3 or 4 slides of a lecture (most lectures had 9-11 slides in total) would be recorded with annotations and narrations, and a gapped handout created for distribution to students. An example of an annotated slide is shown in Figure 2. The structure of the original lectures was such that the first slide or two would relate the content to prior learning, before the introduction of key concepts which would then be built on subsequently. As such, the early slides from any given lecture provided a sound basis for the creation of partially flipped lectures, with some of the characteristics of Seery and Donnelly’s pre-lecture resources (31).
Figure 2. An example of an annotated slide from a partially flipped lecture 63
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In the first instance, the partial flipping approach was applied to one of the three weekly lectures, typically that which took place on Friday morning. The preceding lecture was on Tuesday morning, with partially flipped recordings being made available on Wednesdays in most cases, giving students at least 36 hours in which to watch the flipped recordings prior to the face-to-face session. Students were issued a hardcopy of the gapped handout for the flipped pre-lecture at the end of the Tuesday lecture and were told that it was compulsory to watch the recording and fully annotate the handout. For the first few weeks that the approach was employed, students were asked to bring their annotated handout to the Friday lecture in order to demonstrate that they had completed the work. The Panopto system also logged data regarding the number of views by each student and which parts of recordings were viewed most/least frequently.
Making Use of in-Class Contact Time Freed up by Partial Flipping
In most cases, several clicker questions were used at the start of the lecture to test comprehension of material covered during the pre-lecture, to provoke discussion about what was challenging, and to identify which points needed further clarification. This approach had the additional benefit that any students who had not had the chance to watch the pre-lecture would be able to catch up to some extent through discussions with their peers. In a number of lectures, the peer-instruction approach, first proposed in the context of physics teaching by Mazur (41), was used to provide a focus for discussion. This involves a clicker question first being posed to students to answer independently before being posed for a second time, at which point students are able to discuss their answers with peers prior to polling. Crouch and Mazur (42) demonstrated that peer-instruction led to significant learning gains when used with physics students, and the use of this method in chemistry teaching, to capitalize on the use of the flipped classroom, has been reported previously (28). Additionally, the increased availability of time in face-to-face sessions meant that there was more opportunity for students to ask questions orally, and it was also possible to use demonstrations to illustrate chemical phenomena, which had not been possible during the previous year of teaching.
Student Engagement and Evaluation of Impact
As mentioned above, the Panopto system provides data regarding student usage of recordings. After the first flipped lecture, students were shown the data for that particular recording, and they also presented their completed lecture handouts.
In total, 26 students out of 35 present had watched the recording, and the 9 that had not could clearly see that they were at a disadvantage in comparison to those who had completed the work. Subsequent inspection of viewing statistics for the 21 flipped pre-lectures released during the year showed that > 90% of students
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typically viewed these recordings, a considerably higher proportion than those who viewed recordings made of scheduled (i.e. non-flipped) lectures.
It should be noted that the evaluation methods employed here (and in the second case study) were approved by the University of Southampton’s Ethics and Research Govenance body (ERGO). Students were surveyed at the end of the 2013/
14 academic year to probe their use of pre-lecture recordings and their perception of the impact they had on their learning. The survey, which was not validated, was designed to probe the student response to partial flipping in terms of the impact on confidence, and perceived impacts on learning. Seventeen students completed the survey, a response rate of over 50% of the 32 students who took the final exam.
Data relating to Likert scale response items is illustrated in Table 1. Key points are the fact that students report increased confidence in a range of different contexts, most notably with regard to answering questions orally in class. Of particular importance, bearing in mind the overarching objectives of this work, is the fact that a large portion of students report increased confidence in studying chemistry independently.
Table 1. Students’ views regarding the value of flipped lectures on the Fundamentals of Chemistry module in 2013/14a
SA A N D SD
The flipped lectures meant I spent more time studying
chemistry than I otherwise would have. 6 3 2 5 1
The flipped lectures have increased my confidence
when solving problems. 5 5 7 0 0
The flipped lectures have increased my confidence
when asking questions in class. 6 4 6 1 0
The flipped lectures have increased my confidence
when answering questions (verbal) in class. 10 3 3 1 0 The flipped lectures have increased my confidence
when discussing chemical concepts with my peers. 4 6 7 0 0 The flipped lectures have increased my confidence
when studying chemistry independently. 6 5 5 0 0
aSA = strongly agree; A = agree; N = neutral; D = disagree; SD = strongly disagree
Some insightful qualitative data was also collected through open response questions in the survey, pointing to a number of key benefits from the perspective of the students, which are summarized in Table 2 in the form of extracts from students’ comments. These data indicate that students were able to see the value of the partial flipping approach, and it is particularly gratifying that many of the points made refer to benefits which the educator had hoped to achieve. An additional benefit of analyzing such data is that it supports the implementation of refinements
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in future years, and can also be very persuasive in encouraging colleagues to experiment with similar innovations, as evidenced in the second case study. One particularly eloquent student quote sums up the success of this trial, and is included in its entirety below as a compelling piece of evidence that the partial flipping approach used in this case did indeed achieve its objectives.
“I have found the flipped lectures implemented into the syllabus to be an incredibly valuable resource over the last several months.
“They are an ingenious way to convey the information prior to a main lecture, giving the students relevant background and understanding in order to constructively contribute in class.
“Utilising technology for this purpose allows me time to pause, comprehend and think about how the information being conveyed fits into what has been learnt previously."
2. Enhancing the Flip: Adding Interactivity to Pre-Lecture Videos Using