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Jul 04, 2015 07:18

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keristars July 4 2015, 19:12:00 UTC
Flipped classrooms: do the people promoting this talk about what happens for students who have trouble retaining information from video/books? Like, is the whole point that people don't retain information from the lectures anyway, so who cares if they don't retain it on their own, let's just focus on learning during problem sets in the classroom later?

I've been curious about this, because I also see online learning gain in popularity (even as studies are coming out that students learn better from physical books than ebooks and from handwritten notes than typed notes).

My backstory:

I'm AWFUL at retaining information I've only read/watched, and I really thrive in a lecture setting. It's one reason why I failed so thoroughly in my attempt at graduate school - there were no in-person lectures to help me learn/remember the content through markers such as timbre of the instructor's voice or notes written during a lecture to mark important elements, then filled in or checked against the texts for thoroughness.

We did have recorded lectures from the instructors, but without the physical presence of the instructor and the ability to ask for a pause or rewording of a concept/statement in real time, it just didn't work. Even comparing to when I had large lecture halls, with fewer pauses to answer questions or reiterate something, it just wasn't the same.

I mean, I can learn from recordings or books, but it's a very slow process (I did, after all, get a 4 on the AP Chem exam and earn a Magna Cum Laude gpa despite missing nearly 9 weeks of class senior year, all total). The most successful I've been with book learning is knitting, and even so, there it is mostly "here is a technique, here is what it does" and experimenting to figure it out myself. If I'm given a pattern, follow it, and even watch YT videos explaining how it works and read blogs about how it works, I can't really explain it myself or use the elements in a new way. But if I have someone next to me doing it, and explaining it? yep, those are all things I remember well and in detail.

But...sometimes I wonder if I have some minor learning disability, or if it's related to Asperger's, or something else. I still really want to finish the graduate program I started, but if flipped classrooms become the norm, I'm worried that I would fail again and it would be a waste of time.

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beccastareyes July 4 2015, 22:48:33 UTC
Man, now I wished that I'd posted it earlier, because I think this would be a great discussion topic. (There's a forum for graduates of the class -- would it be all right for me to submit an edited version of your post?)

We talked a bit about making sure students were getting the introduction we wanted by setting low-stakes assignments for pre-class. Which would at least identify a student who was having trouble with pre-class work. But having a student coming to my office every day to work through the content would help.

We also discussed interaction out of class like forums, but I don't always know how to get students to use them besides bribery. (That and I keep earlier hours than my students.) Basically, the idea being that if you don't give the students some face time (even virtual face time) with professors, you might as well be running a MOOC course.

Part of it was making sure that in-class work and interaction reinforced the out of class work. Like for my sample lesson, I wanted students to learn some vocabulary and get the basic ideas behind Kepler's Laws before class, and then we'd do all the practice applications and discussion and stuff when I was present. One thing that was talked about but not emphasized was that the in-class part has to be important because that's what makes the material stick. (And presumably students can gauge what info is relevant.)

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keristars July 6 2015, 19:27:49 UTC
sorry for my slow reply! I read your comment on my phone, then forgot to come back to LJ on my laptop. (the hazards of smartphone email...)

But, yeah, go ahead and edit it and post it if you'd like!

Forums - I actually found this to be even worse for my success at online school than the screen-learning, but I suppose it's all related. You know how when you're in class with other people, you can hear them talk and form your own thoughts or refine your understanding and take notes and all that all at the same time? That's not possible with forum interaction. With forums (or even LJ comments :D) you have a block of text and are limited with what you can do while you're reading/parsing. You can take notes, but you have to stop reading to do it. You can type your own response, but it's a post-hoc thing, and not mid-argument (technically you're not supposed to interrupt in class, but there are natural pauses where you can interject a question - that's not something you get with forums).

In my classes, we were required to post a certain number of times a week on certain topics and to reply to other students a minimum number of times. But that's very daunting if you're not sure what you want to talk about, and even moreso if you are a "follower" in conversations (one of my bosses explicitly said that about me: I don't have stated opinions or questions at first, but use other peoples' statements to see where I have holes in my understanding or where my opinion might differ and be worth discussing). I would wait until the end of the week to read the early posters' topics and respond, but then it would be so late that I ran out of time for my own posts or got too stressed to do it at all.

I think my difficulties with classroom forums/bboards is strongly linked to my difficulties with screen-learning. How common is this? I have no idea. But it can't be uncommon, and since I know my own limitations, I worry about future students... (My little sister is the exact opposite - she struggled with traditional school, but excelled at a correspondence program and graduated high school early.)

Like for my sample lesson, I wanted students to learn some vocabulary and get the basic ideas behind Kepler's Laws before class, and then we'd do all the practice applications and discussion and stuff when I was present.

I do wonder about this - that's what we did in my astronomy classes. It wasn't flipped - we still got the lecture in class - but we were required to read the chapters before class and were given pop quizzes for Did You Read as class began (not written or anything - the prof would randomly choose students to answer, and it was all basic concepts). But that class was at New College of Florida, which was an honors school... Most of my classes at New College were structured like that with basic concepts assumed to be familiar (if not fully grasped), whereas my early classes when I transferred to UNF were more lecture hall where the reading helped but wasn't strictly necessary to do before class.

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beccastareyes July 8 2015, 17:59:49 UTC
Even when I lecture, I try to provide natural chances for students to ask me things. Because, yeah, the basic idea I was taught is 'put the stuff that needs the most face to face time at the time when you and the students are supposed to be in the same room, put the stuff that least needs real-time student-to-professor or student-to-student interaction as pre or post-class work'.

So, yeah, I wouldn't expect most students to come in with 100% understanding*, and there's going to be a lot of variation in figuring out where the students most need me.

* There's always a few students that I could hand the textbook and the assignments and be all 'here are the deadlines and when tests/quizzes are, see you then!', just like there's that one student who isn't ready for this course or gets mono halfway through the term, or just hasn't figured out class-life balance, or decided to take three hard courses in the same term.

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