I am trying to explain why I am hopeful that the concept of classroom flipping has merit. I am not here to defend early iterations of online learning. Of course the early iterations will be the most problematic. Hopefully with a few iterations, the coursework of the 6 deficient classes can be made sufficient.
Hope is nice, but in the world of education, it rarely pans out.
For example, you're assuming there will be multiple iterations. In the majority of cases, there almost certainly won't be. DS's Java class lectures were so old, his final assignment required him to use a technology that isn't really used anymore because of security problems. There was a big mistake in an early physics lab he had to do. The data for a uniform acceleration experiment had serious flaws, as in, the uniformly accelerating object stopped, went backwards, and moved with constant velocity.
I tracked down the guy who wrote the course and suggested he might want to fix the data. He answered:
> I wrote course several years ago and I am no longer associated with it.
>
> The data is actual data generated in a lab, not perfect data predicted
> mathematically.
Translation:
I could not care less. PFO.The fact that numerous students have learned both of these subjects exclusively through the books and/or online materials contradicts your statement.
I'm one of them. I'm an autodidact. I've been teaching myself stuff for decades. I've learned that success in self-teaching requires three things:
- Many resources (books, Google, video and/or audio recordings)
- An ability to pose important and relevant questions that can be answered with the tools above.
- Discipline (a lot of it)
Single resources rarely have all the information one needs to learn something. I have the financial resources to have access to many books and other learning materials. Most teenagers don't. As a HG+ adult with a science PhD, I am very good at points 2 and 3. But these two skills didn't exist in me at birth. I had to learn them, and that took a lot of time. In fact, point 2 is an important part of a PhD or a research-based master's. I doubt that even gifted high school kids have these skills (
especially the second one) for the most part. I've worked with or supervised a lot of very bright adults who don't have these skills. It's like they flounder around, not realizing that they're not asking the right questions. I don't know, but these skills might only develop in people who are very good at a given pursuit (i.e. a HG+ athlete or artist might see in me the same inabilities in those fields that I've seen in others in my areas of strength).
Plus, there are also the points about Socratic vs. auto-didactic learners.
A major problem of a flipped classroom is that it puts a large part of the burden of teaching onto the students. This is wrong, IMO. The whole point of being a teacher is that you're supposed to know so much more than the students, you can do more than just impart information from a textbook.
You might argue that teachers don't always measure up in this regard, and I would agree with you. But moving to the extreme of video teaching is, I think, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, yes, I've decided for now that flipped classrooms, as practiced in that link I used, are a bad idea. I do see merit in asking students to watch
someone else's videos
after they've been exposed to the ideas in class. Right now, I think that interactive live teaching is probably the best way to get your points across.
