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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 [1]. 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 [2], we taught our original classes to scientists scattered across the U.S.  We adopted WebEx [3], 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.

Read more [4]