Just five minutes into his morning organic chemistry class, associate professor Mike Lewis is in full swing, scribbling what looks like a series of hieroglyphs across a large screen projected at the front of the room.
He’s working through a series of chemistry problems, tossing around references to carbons, solvents, ketones and aldehydes. Throughout the class, students chime in with suggestions or ask for clarification on the tougher points.
All in all, it looks like a typical college classroom. Except that something is missing.
At no point during the 50-minute class does Lewis break into anything resembling a lecture.
Not this day. Not on any day in this version of Principles of Chemistry II at ºüÀêÊÓƵ University.
In education-speak, it is a flipped classroom, where students such as Theresa Schafer are assumed to have watched a prerecorded lecture before plopping down in one of the desks.
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“If you walk into a class like this unprepared, you aren’t going to learn,†said Schafer, a freshman from Fort Scott, Kan., studying to become a physical therapist.
The goal, advocates say, is to use class time to help students get past obstacles they have encountered. It is not exactly a new idea. But it is one that is growing in popularity, along with the more controversial massive online open course, more commonly referred to as a MOOC.
Pushing everything is the notion that higher education needs to transform itself, as lawmakers, parents and students are casting critical eyes on both the price and value of college degrees.
CHANGING DYNAMICS
In the case of flipped classes, it is becoming increasingly easy for professors to package lectures, quizzes, videos and PowerPoint presentations and deliver them to students before they come to class.
Professors at ºüÀêÊÓƵ University have been doing rudimentary versions of the flipped classroom for a number of years, said Debra Lohe, director of the school’s Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning.
“But technology has caught up with people’s desire to design their courses this way,†she said.
The school signed on in 2011 with Tegrity, a lecture-capture program owned by McGraw-Hill Education, which said the program’s nationwide use had essentially doubled since 2010.
One of the things that has quickly sold Lewis on the concept is the way it is pulling more students into class discussions. In his recent chemistry session, for example, nearly two dozen students spoke up at one point or another.
“In a normal class, if I were lecturing about chemistry, I wouldn’t get anything like that,†Lewis said. “There would have been four to five brave students who spoke up.â€
At first glance, there may seem to be little difference between these flipped classrooms and the good old days when an instructor would assign reading material before a class.
But there are other components — including online quizzes — that push students like never before to actually do the work ahead of time.
“That was the component that had been missing before. The carrot or stick or whatever you want to call it,†said Bethany Stone, an associate professor of biology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who has been using the flipped model since 2010.
As at ºüÀêÊÓƵ University, the idea is increasingly catching the eyes of faculty members at Mizzou, said Danna Vessell, director of the office that helps faculty members use technology when redesigning their courses.
“It’s become a more popular word, I guess,†Vessell said. “People are starting to recognize the verbiage a little more.â€
CUTTING COSTS
Few things are more trendy at the moment, however, than the massive online courses offered through private companies such as Coursera and Udacity and nonprofits such as edX. They are online courses, generally offered for free, serving thousands of students at a time.
Supporters hail the model as a way to educate large groups of students cheaply. And though few experts see them as a total replacement for traditional teaching, there are those who see a place for the concept — particularly in teaching introductory classes.
“We really have to figure out ways to increase productivity in higher education. MOOCs are just one way of doing it,†said Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.
These classes, however, have an enormous obstacle to overcome: At present, they offer little more than a chance to learn simply for the sake of learning, because the vast majority of the nation’s colleges do not consider them worthy of credits that can be applied toward a degree.
But change may be coming, with state universities in California now looking at these classes as a way to cut costs. San Jose State University, for example, recently announced plans to develop a trio of for-credit courses with Udacity.
And last month, the American Council on Education offered its stamp of approval on five courses deemed worthy of college credit. Those include a genetics course offered by Duke University and an algebra course by the University of California at Irvine. It remains to be seen how many of the nation’s colleges will agree with the education council’s assessment.
Even if schools are hesitant to officially recognize work done in these courses, most colleges do have a way to offer credit for a student’s knowledge, regardless of how it was gained, said Robert Archibald, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and co-author of the book “Why Does College Cost So Much?â€
Often referred to as “credit by examination,†it allows students to take a test to prove they already know what they would otherwise learn in a particular course.
“Because that back door is there, there is a way to morph that into a front door,†Archibald said.
But even if students are not getting credit for their work, that does not mean the courses have no value. If nothing else, they are a chance to explore a topic free of charge and obligation, said Michael Evans a graduate student and chemistry instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Evans is teaching an eight-week chemistry course through the school’s new partnership with Coursera. In person, it is the sort of class that may have 200 students. He’ll have somewhere around 8,000 for the online version, giving him a chance to play ambassador for his department.
“It’s really nice to be able to put 8,000 sets of eyes on my content,†Evans said. “We kind of have a public relations problem. Chemistry is not everyone’s favorite science.â€
There are those on campus, however, who aren’t thrilled to see the school align itself with one of the nation’s leaders in massive online courses. Some faculty members are worried about moving too quickly in an arena full of uncertainty.
It is still unclear, for example, how companies such as Coursera will make money, said Kathryn Oberdeck, an associate history professor and former faculty senator.
“There has to be a profit incentive somewhere along the line,†Oberdeck said. “What’s the point at which they will generate a profit? And how is that going to affect what we do?â€
Others worry about education leaders’ falling in love with the notion that technology will allow the cheap education of the masses.
Doug Guthrie is the dean of the George Washington University School of Business, which just launched a new online MBA program involving 17 (rather than 17,000) students, from around the world, including Afghanistan, Turkey and South America.
Guthrie is a strong proponent of technology as a way to reach remote students and to develop better ways to educate: “I’m not among the naysayers. I do believe the revolution is coming. It’s very real.â€
Yet he stops well short of supporting mass online classes, which he compares to radio or TV broadcasts.
“Learning well and teaching well means engagement. There’s just no getting around that,†Guthrie said.
“Anything that approaches this as a broadcast medium is going to fail.â€