What I learned by flipping the MOOC


Two of the hot topics in education in the last few years have been Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the flipped classroom. I’ve been experimenting with both of them, Forbes reports.

What I’ve learned (besides being able to use the word “pedagogy” in a sentence) is 1) assigning students lectures as homework doesn’t guarantee the students will watch them and 2) in a flipped classroom you can become hostage to the pedagogy.

Here’s the story of what we tried and what we learned.

… When my Lean LaunchPad class was adopted by the National Science Foundation, we taught our original classes to scientists scattered across the U.S.  We adopted WebEx, a web video conferencing tool, to hold our classes remotely.

Just like my students at Stanford, these NSF teams got out of the building and spoke to 10-15 customers a week. Back in their weekly class, the scientists would present their results in front of their peers – in this case via Webex, as the teaching team gave them critiques and “guidance”. When their presentations were over, it was my turn.

I lectured to these remote students about the next week’s objectives.

After the first NSF class held via videoconference, it dawned on me that since I wasn’t physically in front of the students, they wouldn’t know if my lecture was live or recorded.

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