Certifiably Flipped

My Flipped Classroom Certificate

This rumpled certificate arrived this week, along with my Sophia.org T-Shirt for successfully completing the Flipped Classroom Pathway Course . There were tutorials to listen to and quizzes to take. The last step was to create a flipped classroom tutorial, publish it to the Sophia.org site and submit it for review.

Hot though it may be at the moment, this flipping idea is not new. I seem to remember Patricia Cross made a remark to similar effect several years ago when asking why we spent so much time imparting the knowledge level info during class when we could be spending class time helping students apply the knowledge.

So though I was familiar with the concept, I found myself feeling a bit nervous when it came to creating the tutorial. The fields for listing the course description, objectives, and tags were helpful, as were tips for not only providing a slideshow or video.

What I found even more helpful were the tips on adding other documents or quizzes that would increase the impact of the tutorial you wanted learners to complete after viewing the tutorial. These items can certainly add to the preparation you want students to have before the face-to-face or live class session where the students are going to work with the material at a higher level.

Whether a person is going to search and use found materials as part of the pre-class session is up to the faculty member. The real opportunity is how to use to face-to-face time to best support the higher learning.