Flipping Your University Class

Dr Eric McCreath, Research School of Computer Science, will speak on "Flipping Your Class - Without Flipping Out" at the Australian National University in Canberra, 1pm 13 August 2015:

"The traditional approach to teaching has the teacher deliver core content as lectures, after which students go off and complete exercises, labs, assignment, etc. with often little help from, or interaction with, teaching staff or other students. The idea of "flip teaching" is that lecture material is recorded and listened to outside of class. This frees up class time to focus on the more interactive aspects of education.

Given dwindling lecture attendance (students where just watching the lectures at home anyway), in 2013 and 2014, I flipped my Introduction to Computer Systems class, providing students with pre-recorded lecture content and reorganised class time. This talk will summarise the changes I made to the course, overview the tools used, and reflect on the educational outcomes. Overall this has been a positive experience and I plan to refine and continue this teaching approach in coming years."

It seems to me that Eric's approach can be used not only to address dwindling lecture attendance but also issess of students cheating. If students are required to be active and involved in class, then it is more likely they will learn and so have less incentive to cheat on assessment. Also if they are required to do many small tasks spread over a whole semester it will be much harder to carry out the mechanics of cheating than for one large assignment or examination.