Flipped studio learning

While we dispensed with traditional lectures years ago, we had a school education manager who was really interested in best practices for learning physics. We wanted to optimise the time the educators have with the students and to provide the best active learning physical environment.

When we first tried flipped learning we were teaching in a lecture style space and it just wasn’t successful.

We now fully embrace this way of teaching combined with the use of purpose built spaces to provide an active learning and peer learning environment.

Series of steps

	Design the workshops: There is a two-hour workshop with questions on slides. Some of these are very short answer questions where we want instant feedback using polling tools. We aim to get the students to think about the problems. There is an opportunity for the students to stand at the whiteboards in the room, work through the maths and flesh out the physics. This is matched up with the pre-workshop videos.
	Online materials compliment workshops: We give students videos to watch before coming to class. They are very short snippets, around 10 minutes, with a single message. A single key point. The material they cover in a week is laid out in Moodle. There is a small amount of text and then the video to explain the concept. There may be a link to a textbook, some questions in the textbook. We encourage the students to go back over the videos if they don’t understand things.
	Incentives: We incentivised the students to watch the material online by having relevant quizzes run at the start of the workshops. The quizzes are designed to be easy if the Moodle material has been studied.

The feedback we get from students on the material available to them online is great. Student satisfaction has improved now compared to the first couple of years when we started it.

If you can engage the students and get them talking in class and learning from each other, then you get better outcomes in terms of their development.

Some of the feedback from students include: Videos are excellent and workshop engagement is great. The complaints are there but minor and more about tweaks to the way the subject is taught.

Create a lot of content for the online material. It’s a significant time and effort investment upfront.

Slides and materials for class time need to be modified for this approach. Ensure to create questions that are level appropriate

Allow time for updating the material each year after the change.

My advice for this flipped model relates to Physics and Mathematics where it is problem based and we encourage the students to learn from each other. There are elements of this way of teaching that need to be flexible or evolve. For example: first year classes can be one hundred flipped, no new content delivered in class. By third year and honours where the concepts are more complex - there needs to be a mix of teaching approaches. While there is still content before the class time, there is a need to reinforce that knowledge by having conversations about that material in class.

Be prepared for a large-scale effort initially, this will be rewarded with a much smaller time taken for updates each year. Be prepared for a deep dive and slow going over of material.

There is always a central focus of classes being student led and go at the pace they deem necessary. Maybe you cover less of the bespoke content but give the students an opportunity for a deeper understanding and how to teach themselves.

You need buy-in from everyone involved in teaching and leading the education effort.