Tag Archives: video

KAMALL 2014 – Challenges and Opportunities in a Flipped Writing Classroom

I was happy to present on my attempt to “flip” my writing class last semester.  This presentation was really a preliminary look at the data, but the more I looked, the more interesting it became. This is the type of design-based research that both informs technology and practice.

Dan in Video Lecture

Challenges and Opportunities in a Flipped Writing Classroom (PPT)

Abstract:

This study evaluates the implementation of a Flipped Classroom approach in two academic English writing courses at a Korean university. The Flipped Classroom approach inverts a traditional class design with students viewing lectures at home and doing homework in class. It was developed in response to a perceived lack of classroom time for engagement and an increase in access to computer and Internet technologies.

Two writing courses for 67 English majors at a Korean university were flipped with the intention of reducing lecture time and increasing students’ discussion of and engagement with writing concepts and practice during class time. Instruction was designed to match these goals. For each major topic, students watched a video and took an online quiz to assess their recall of ideas from the video lecture prior to attending class. In class, students were given time to ask questions about the lectures and assignments. They were then asked to do class activities that encouraged them to come to a deeper understand of the course content. These activities included worksheets, a range of group activities, self- and peer-review of essays, and writing.

PowerPoint presentations were created for major topics in the course (7 total). From these presentations, video lectures were created. Four different screencasting programs were used (Movenote, ActivePresenter, knovio, and Present.me) in order to evaluate which of the programs best fit the development needs of the instructor and the viewing preferences of the students.

This research was conducted as a type of action research (Lewin, 1946). The researcher was also the lecturer for the two writing courses. As such, the focus of the research was to better understand and improve on the instructional design of the course.  To accomplish this, data were collected from numerous sources, including quizzes, one-on-one and whole class interactions, a research journal, and student survey responses. Preliminary findings will be presented in three categories: student perceptions, teacher perceptions, and instructional design.

Based on student and teacher experiences, the there are a number of instructional design changes that will take place in future classes. Videos will be shorter. This will be accomplished by making more videos that focus on fewer elements in each. Quizzes remain a good way to encourage students to watch the video lectures and to assess their understanding of the content prior to coming to class. It is clear, however, that a better way to push students to both view the videos and take the quizzes is needed. Lastly, more/better activities need to be developed for classes. In particular, I found that we had too few writing samples, too few opportunities to correct negative examples, and too few opportunities to write for the instructional objectives of the day.

http://tinyurl.com/kamall2014flip (PPT – Google Docs)

“Moodle” Official Music Video – Great student project…I kinda hate Moodle too, though.

Moodle 2+ has been a nightmare and I don’t see it improving…ever. I’m going to ditch it as soon as it’s convenient to do so. However, it could be worse. I could be forced to use Blackboard 🙂

This is a fun student project pimping the virtues of Moodle.

The Pursuit of Technology Integration Happiness: Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education

I disagree that this is a reinvention of education. These videos are little more than traditional lectures and tutors. It is a reinvention of content distribution with crowd sourced tutoring, which, don’t get me wrong, are both awesome.

The Khan Academy is a great repository for educational content (particularly mathematics-related topics) and a fantastic cheerleader for this combination of educational content and tutoring.

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