Saturday, January 28, 2012

TI-Publishview, Desire2Learn, and the Flipped Online Classroom

I have been reading a great deal lately about the whole notion of a Flipped Classroom. If you are unsure as to what the concept of the Flipped Classroom is then just access the following link:

http://esheninger.blogspot.com/2011/11/flipped-classroom-explained.html

If online tools and technology are needed for a successful Flipped Classroom, then it would seem logical that the distance education environment would be the ideal place to have a Flipped Classroom. There is one potential problem with the Flipped Classroom concept... how do you track students to ensure they are watching the videos and interacting with the content? There has to be student accountability in the Flipped Classroom... outside the brick and mortar building especially. They need to know... that you know as a teacher... exactly how much work you assign outside of school is being completed. Otherwise the prerequisite work may never get done.

In Newfoundland and Labrador we have Desire2Learn as our learning management system (LMS). It allows us to place just about any content inside our LMS and track it (analytics essentially). Desire2Learn allows me as the teacher to see how often students access content and how long they use that content. It can give a teacher individual student reports as well as group reports on a single content item. Very powerful tool for any teacher. That, for me, removes one hurdle. There was another.

I was not convinced (and still not), based on my years of experience with distance education students, that students want to watch videos exclusively. They also want to interact with content... to perform an action and see a consequence... to touch and feel math.

That is where TI-Publishview comes in. With it I can create interactive content (no programming language required), show it with multiple representations, and upload it inside of Desire2Learn's content manager. That way I can track the interactive content I create just like I can for any other piece of content.

So, with all the video content out there in Internet Land and the content I create with TI-Publishview, am I ready to start flipping my class. You betcha:)

That, as well as a detailed blog post on what TI-Publishview is, will be in an up and coming blog post. Stay tuned :)

1 comment:

Dana Griffiths said...

Well written and thought out, as usual, Rick!