Last fall, I implemented a set of benchmark quizzes in my organic chemistry classes.  These quizzes arose from a simple question:  “What should every student who passes my class be able to do?”  Adapting the approach of Joshua Ring, the quizzes were pass-fail, with no partial credit.  Students had more than one attempt to pass the quizzes, but they had to get the quiz completely correct in order to pass.  Further, I tethered the quizzes to students’ homework grades:  In order to receive credit for homework, students had to pass 5 of the 6 benchmarks by the end of the semester. Not everything went as planned.  My benchmarks were compressed toward the end of the semester, leading me to trim the number of quizzes and removing the restriction on the homework grade.  Nonetheless, the results were remarkable:  Rather than limping through exams with partial credit and moving on to other topics, the multi-attempt, pass-fail approach drove students to analyze their knowledge gaps and hone their understanding.  After two or three failed attempts, students often made their way to my office to figure out what they did wrong.  It clearly made them stronger. Quantitatively, I was able to compare my class to the previous two semesters, using the ACS standardized exam.  The only major pedagogical change was the introduction of the benchmarks.  Here are the exciting results: Semester Students Average Percentile Fall 2015 58 56 Spring 2016 40 45 Fall 2017 46 73 I don’t think the Benchmark quizzes can be exclusively credited with these outcomes.  Our fall classes are usually stronger, and this was an exceptional bunch.  However, they definitely contributed.  I was especially interested to see the effect on those students at the bottom of the class, who often have the most pronounced knowledge gaps.  Here is the change limited to those students who finished in the bottom quartile of the class on the ACS exams: Semester Students Average Percentile Fall 2015 15 17 Spring 2016 10 11 Fall 2017 12 23 This semester, I've moved out of the organic sequence and into Introductory Chemistry.  I'm teaching large daytime and evening sections, and using an adapted benchmark scheme for both.  More to come about this in an upcoming article. ... View more

What should every student who passes my organic class be able to do? Joshua Ring is an associate professor of organic chemistry at Lenoir-Rhyne University.  This past summer, I had the opportunity to hear Joshua give a talk at BCCE.  He posed this question, and offered an innovative solution, recently featured in C&E News.   In essence, Joshua flips his class, then uses a series of benchmark quizzes built around the learning objectives.  The quizzes are pass-fail.  He gives no partial credit.  However, students have multiple attempts to demonstrate mastery.   In his class, there are about 7 essential benchmarks that students must pass in order to pass.  There are 14 additional benchmarks – the number of these that the student is able to pass determines the final grade. The Modification Although the class structure at my school is much different than at Lenoir-Rhyne, I was intrigued.  I therefore designed a modified benchmark system for my class.  We began with six benchmarks: Structure – Draw Lewis structures with correct formal charge and electron counts; identify electronic & molecular geometries & hybridization Nomenclature – Correctly name key molecules, including alkanes/alkenes/alkynes Function – identify acidic and basic sites, nucleophiles, electrophiles S N 1, S N 2, E1, E2 - Show complete arrow-pushing mechanisms for these four fundamental processes. Reactions of Alkenes - Show products from addition reactions to alkenes. Spectroscopy - Identify major features from NMR/IR/MS The benchmarks were pass-fail, but students had more than one attempt to take them.   The class also included an online homework grade.  However, in order to “unlock” their homework grade, they had to pass five of the six benchmarks. Implementation  Here is one version of the first benchmark quiz: Students had to be essentially 100% right to pass.  The first time, only about 44% passed.  The next time it was offered, another 30% passed.  Eventually, nearly everyone in the class passed the exam. The thing I liked about this was that it stressed to students the importance of learning the fundamentals.   And it seemed to pay off as the class wore on – I saw fewer problems with identifying electronic geometry or goofy formal charges on mechanism questions.  Unfortunately, I could not fully implement the benchmark scheme.  Because of the coverage of our text, too many of my benchmarks landed later in the semester, and, pressed for time, I was forced to cut the benchmark quizzes short, and also to remove the tether to the homework grade.  Despite the fizzle at the end, I was pleased with this first attempt.  I feel that my students are better prepared heading into organic 2 than they have been in the past.  The pass-fail approach drove students to practice the material until they got it down.  Outlook I am not teaching organic next semester, and so won’t have an immediate opportunity to improve on the approach with that course.  However, I plan to institute benchmarks for introductory chemistry.  I am planning on 12-14 benchmarks (essentially one per chapter), closely tied to the chapter learning objectives.  Students will take benchmarks at the beginning of lab each week.  I’m excited to see how it goes! ... View more

In my two previous blog posts, we explored why Pete, Melanie and I believe critical thinking is an important aspect to undergraduate education and how we assessed whether or not flipped teaching could be used to improve critical thinking skills in our students. In this third and final chapter, we share the results of our study as well as other lessons we learned through this experience. Video Link : 1870 ... View more

I teach General Chemistry with a flipped classroom. In class, the students work in groups to complete worksheets that cover the ideas of the day. I am making these worksheets available free to teaching professionals on my blog, JohnOsterhout.com. The Flipped General Chemistry page contains a description of how I flip the classroom. There you can download examples of my assignment sheets, worksheets, and worksheet keys. There is a link to the Worksheets page (password required), which is also accessible from the main menu. The Worksheets page currently contains 40 worksheets for General Chemistry I. Each download is a .zip file that unzips to PDF files of the worksheets, editable copies, folders of graphics files, and snapshots of the online homework assignments (SmartWork). As the Fall semester winds down, I will start posting edited and corrected worksheets for General Chemistry II. I will send you the password to the worksheets page if you email me at JohnOsterhout<at>JohnOsterhout<dot>com or look me up at Angelo State University, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and email me there. Please send me a link to your professional website. ... View more

In part I of this blog series, we explored why Pete , Melanie, and I believe critical thinking is a vital skill that students should learn while earning an undergraduate degree. We also explained our hypothesis in which we believe that the utilization of the flipped teaching model allows us to incorporate more active learning and blended learning techniques that can enable our students to further practice and hone those skills associated with critical thinking. In this video, we explain both the differences in our three classes and how we incorporate flipped teaching; as well as our study methodology and the tools we utilized to assess whether or not flipped teaching promotes critical thinking within our students.  Video Link : 1869 ... View more

In lab, I’ve constantly found myself trying to come up with a good way to explain how students should do a measurement and take a reading.  This is a challenge both in my General Chemistry I labs and in my Analytical Chemistry course.  Our goal is to teach the students how to (literally) look at the experiment the same way as an expert would, and I have been convinced for some time that technique videos are a great fit for flipped chemistry approaches:  By moving the lecture out of the lab, we leave more lab time to actually do the experiment in-class, focusing more time for feedback on the nuance of their technique.  Further, with technique videos, students can revisit the techniques (finesse included) as they think through their post-lab assignments. I have tried to make technique videos in past semesters, but these have had a number of shortcomings that undercut my goals.  Few humans I’ve met have more than 2 hands, myself included.  Using one to hold a camera left me with a clumsy and artificial technique, which is a tremendous challenge in demonstrating analytical-quality lab technique.  The focal point of my camera slid in and out of focus, making it hard to see a meniscus or glassware markings.  The shifting field of view made it challenging to tell what I’m actually looking at.  And, worse still, the viewer could only see where my eyes OR my hands were working, but not both simultaneously.  A tripod-mounted camera addressed some of these issues and allowed the viewer to see more of the gross movements of a technique, but cost us all the close-up details that are so critical. Recently, I decided to blend these two approaches in conjunction with David Jaeger, the Director of Web, E-Learning, and Publication Services here at Florida Gulf Coast University.  Dave had approached me about comparing the efficacy of learning from first person vs. third person views of laboratory techniques.  In order to make Dave’s videos, we worked together to list each discrete action or reading that I took when making a laboratory measurement.  We planned to make videos for the use of an analytical balance, a volumetric pipette, and a buret; I use our list of ‘actions’ to guide me, and Dave monitored what else he observed me doing.  This dual approach captured the complete sequence of events that took place while doing a measurement, and ensured that my own experienced technique did not create ‘blind-spots’ where I forgot that a student was missing a skill or instinct.  Dave plans to run experiments with student subjects to determine when the first- vs. third-person view is more useful. My focus was different, but collinear with his goals: I wanted to develop videos that would teach the students how to best use the glassware with analytical-quality lab technique.  My thinking was that since the first- and third-person views have complementary strengths and weaknesses, I might be able to address the weaknesses of each by combining them.  I decided that I wanted to develop a split-screen video.  One portion of the screen would be my direct point-of-view recording (1 st person, which I dubbed the ‘expert eye’ view) while the other was a tripod-mounted over-the-shoulder recording (the ‘wide view’, aka 3 rd person over-the-shoulder).  In practice, we had two wide-view cameras, and I retained them both in the final test video. I will be trying this approach in Spring 2015 with my Analytical Chemistry students, and will be making these videos available to this semester’s General Chemistry I teaching team.  An example video can be found at the link below, and I welcome feedback! Video Link : 1826   Helpful advice in making similar videos: For the first-person view, we used a pair of video-recording sunglasses with clear lenses swapped in to make them look more like safety glasses in the video. (These glasses are often worn by action/adventure sports participants to record videos.)  The camera is in the nosepiece.  It was challenging to keep the hardware in-frame, since the camera and your eyes may not be pointed quite the same. After some trial and error, we found that it was best to calibrate the glasses before recording.  We accomplished this by making a crosshair on one lens with dry-erase marker, then recording for a few seconds to see it the videos was correctly centered, then moving the crosshairs and repeating the process until the video was satisfactorily centered.  Particularly if this crosshair is on the eye away from the camera, this is invisible in the final video – and is hard to notice even when the other camera can see the eyewear. A backdrop is advisable, since the cameras will be recording at different angles and unrelated and distracting background material can easily enter the frame. Even with a heavy cloth backdrop (borrowed from the Campus-related PBS TV station) and the blinds drawn, you can still see light seeping through the backdrop.  We set the curtain up in a u-shape around the bench to best mask the surroundings. In order to sync the two camera recordings later, I clapped my hands a single time – this provided a sound cue that we could easily spot in Camtasia in the audio track, and provided a time=0 point. I did my best to not talk during recording, unless I did so while keeping my mouth as still as possible (ventriloquist style). In test runs, we both found it deeply distracting to see me in the video talking out-of-sync with the new narration, and found that the original soundtrack recording was usually too noisy to understand due to hoods in the background and such. ... View more

[Originally Published March  2015] Last March, I took a few moments to collect my thoughts mid-semester. As we head into a new semester, I offer these reflections from mid-spring: I hope the insights offered will be beneficial to you: March, 2014: This semester, I’ve been flipping my Intro Chem course. As we’ve just completed the midterm, I’d like to stop and look back down the mountain. What’s worked? What hasn’t? Observation #1: It’s a dumb idea to bring a camera crew the first week of class I wrote about how video lessons lack the spontaneity and fun of being in a classroom full of students. In order to fix this, I wanted to try filming my class, and then compare the live versus tablet-only presentation style. So, I contacted the folks in the TV production department, who graciously agreed to film my class the first week. This didn’t work well for a couple of reasons: First, with my white Powerpoint projected onto the screen, the lighting was all wrong. More importantly, I think the presence of two cameras in the first week of class created an intimidating environment. I’m usually pretty good at helping students relax and speak up in class, but this dampened the tone of the class at the outset, and I’ve struggled the rest of the semester to get my class to engage. Observation #2: There and Back Again Maybe because of the first week, or maybe other factors, but my biggest challenge this semester has been getting students to speak up in class. Early in the semester, I used class time to work problems as a group, but the dynamic just wasn’t working. Frustrated, I even tried going back to lecture. The trouble is, if people are not going to speak up during recitation-style problem solving, they’re certainly not going to speak up during a lecture. Ultimately, what seems to work best for this crew is to bring a set of problems, and have them work in small groups. More people are comfortable asking for help in this environment, and students seem to be learning more from this structure. Observation #3: Don’t Spoonfeed - Challenge! In my Organic 2 Lab course this semester, I’ve built pre-lab videos followed by an online quiz - and the students are more engaged and prepared than I’ve ever seen before. With my Intro class, however, I didn’t build in pre-class quizzing - and I really wish I had. Putting all of my lecture content online has been an incredible amount of work for me, and it’s disheartening when only a handful of students have even looked at the material before class. And I think students are more passive if they know they can access the video content the night before the test. Next time I teach this course, I plan to use our online homework system (Sapling Learning) to build pre-class quizzes for each flipped topic, so I can make sure students are watching the video content before class. I already feel like the online homework is my best tool to challenge and engage students (I typically have 80-90% completion rates, even in Intro Chem). If I can use these graded assignments to help students prepare before class, I think we can really raise the bar. And you? I’d love to hear from everyone in the comments section. Have you run into these challenges? What solutions have worked for you? ... View more

[Originally published on September 1, 2015] Cathy Welder at Dartmouth just sent me a link with a brief review: I thought the Flipped Chemistry crowd might want to know about this book. I'm halfway through a hard copy and LOVE it. Great info on many types of active learning. The book, entitled, Reaching Students: What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering, is available for purchase as a hard copy, but also as a free PDF through the National Academy Press website: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18687 Thanks so much for the link - I'm looking forward to diving into this one also. ... View more

[originally posted January 2015]   Heath Giesbrecht teaches intro, general, and organic chemistry at Houston Community College-Southeast College.  He came across my radar because of his  terrific library of teaching videos  on YouTube.  He has some of the best whiteboard presentations I've seen, and covering a wide array of topics.  I'll be adding some of these to the Tools and Resources section over the coming weeks.   I had an opportunity to talk with Heath recently, and am happy to share the conversation here:   Heath, your video library is fantastic.  How did you get started with this?    Thanks, Kevin! As a chemistry educator myself, I really appreciate what you are doing on flippedchemistry.com, so the compliment means a lot coming from you. I want to start off by saying that more than anything I am happy to have been able to produce a library of videos that so many people, students and instructors alike, have expressed to me they found useful. The response from everyone has been wonderful.   In Spring 2010, while I was teaching chemistry at a different institution, I was assigned to develop and teach an online Introductory Chemistry class. While working on this project, I felt the project necessitated me to record videos of the live lectures from my face-to-face class for the online version, both for consistency and impartiality. These lectures lasted about 1-1 ½ hours and consisted of my voice over the PowerPoint slides. Honestly, the student response in the online class to these long videos was poor to say the least. This led me to start thinking of and pursuing alternative ways to engage the students online.   I started to experiment with recording short videos, either as a mini-lecture, a laboratory demonstration, or a solved problem format, with the camera recording me at the whiteboard in front of my class. The students found these to be more appealing and attention-grabbing than the monotonous voice-over lectures, and were enthusiastic to get me to record videos in this style during class and office hours. Students from my other courses found out that I was making these videos for the Intro class and many of them requested that I record videos for their classes (ie. General Chemistry I/II, Organic I/II). I was excited to do so, particularly because of their overall enthusiasm. Unfortunately, two years down the road, I was informed by the DE & IT Director that the sheer number of videos was beginning to overload the college’s server and they would have to be deleted. After losing several hundred of them, I was compelled to move the whole of the collection to YouTube without thinking much about the external impact of the decision.   After two months from the time I posted them, I had more views on my videos using the YouTube channel, than I had for two years while they were on the institution’s server and their popularity continues to grow three years later. When I first established my YouTube channel there were very few channels or videos that had been created by professionals; most of the channels I found around that time were created by amateurs and had many mistakes and inconsistencies. When I started receiving questions and thank you comments from chemistry students all over the world I knew I had to continue not only because I loved teaching chemistry, but because of the free help that the channel was noticeably providing. 2.  How many videos have you produced?   Whenever my students want me to record one for them I’ll do it, as a result I’m regularly adding videos to the library. I know for sure the channel has more than 1100 videos. 3.  How long does it take you to produce each one?   What the viewer gets with my videos is essentially the raw class recordings of a single lecture topic or example problem, hopefully containing a few student responses and maybe a few questions at the end from the students who prompted the recording.   Since I am not very technologically savvy, save for cropping the end of a few of my videos, I refrain from editing them, thus saving me a significant amount of time. In other words, when a student wants me to record a video, I just walk up to the camera, push the record button, work through a problem during class or office hours, and finally upload the video to the YouTube channel. Overall, from initially pressing record to having the completed video uploaded takes about ten minutes for the average five minute video, if I am only doing one. Usually though, I record several videos on the same day, so before I leave work, I begin uploading and they will be on the channel when I return the next morning. So, really the recording time is the longest portion of the process. 4.  How do you use these with your classes?   For my classes, the YouTube content is used in specific course-dependent ways.   In my hybrid courses, my students do not come to class for a lecture section at all, so the videos are used as the exclusive lecture material. I have complete sets of videos for Introductory Chemistry, General Chemistry I and II, and Organic I, so I can and do teach all of these courses in the hybrid format.   In my face-to-face classes, I use the videos strictly as supplementary material. In saying that, I allow my students the ability to choose individually several format options while attending the class. The way I structure my 3 hour lecture period is as follows, 1-1 ½ hours of lecture then problem solving sessions for the rest of the period. Accordingly, if a student prefers the traditional lecture style, they will come for the beginning of class. If they prefer the flipped style where we go over things like extra problem sets, homework, and practice exams, the student has the option to skip the lecture portion and only come when we are working on the worksheet material. This is the time I often find my students wanting me to record videos. Finally, if a student prefers the hybrid format and has signed up for the face-to-face class, I allow them to watch the lecture videos and only come in for the labs, quizzes, and exams. Conversely, if the student prefers the face-to-face format and has signed up for a hybrid class, they are able to sit in on another section if they so choose. 5.  Which of your classes do you flip? Introductory Chemistry, General Chemistry I and II, and Organic I can all be flipped solely with the video content I have created. I am also working on completing the set of Organic II videos and I envision that I will be able to flip it within the next couple of semesters. ... View more

[Originally published on September 23, 2015] This semester, I'm working on pre-lab videos for our organic 1 sequence. I've done a couple of short "how-to" videos in lab using just my phone. I like using Camtasia for video editing, but it accepts a limited number of file types, and I can't embed the quicktime video from my phone directly into Camtasia. I assume others have encountered this challenge as well, and I wanted to share two solutions - one a bit cleaner, and one a bit quicker: The Right Way: A File Conversion Tool Our local AV guru recommends Wondershare Video Converter Pro. For high-quality videos, this is definitely the way to go. The Quick Way: Use Embed the Video Using Office Mix Office Mix is a very powerful add-on that is available for Powerpoint. Using this tool, you can record clips from any video file - Youtube, Vimeo, or wherever, and import it into your Powerpoint presentation. I also use the Camtasia add-in for Powerpoint, so this is a nice trick for incorporating video without doing a file conversion. For example, this week the students are using a rotovap for the first time. In last week's lab, I had a student quickly film me setting up the rotovap. I emailed myself the video. I was able to then "clip" the part of the video I wanted directly into the powerpoint presentation. The whole thing took only a couple minutes. Here's a segment from the completed video:  Video Link : 1827 With a little more time, I'd love to slow down, script it out, plan my motions, and have everything a little more polished. But at this point in the semester, I have to be content with a "good enough" production - and this seems like a nice, quick way to get there. ... View more

[originally posted 12/2/2014] It's that time of the year again where the turkey has been roasted, eaten, sandwiched, casseroled, and sworn off till next year (or next month for some); and if you are in academia you are now preparing for final exams and course/instructor assessment. It was just earlier this week that I passed out our standard institutional assessment forms to my first flipped biochemistry course and because I wanted to gauge the various blended learning techniques I employed over the semester, I added my own additional assessment. In this survey, I asked my students to rate the various tools I utilized in order to "help deepen student understanding on a variety of biochemistry related topics and to facilitate the development of critical thinking skills". These tools included: video lectures, 10 minute "muddiest point" lectures in class, Sapling Online Homework, lecture powerpoints, Facebook "Journal Club" Discussions, Facebook Course Management, exam study guides, exam study sessions, POGIL workbook activities, case studies, metabolic pathway posters, and the Moodle course management page. Students were asked to rate these tools on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being not beneficial at all and 10 being very beneficial) and then comment on the tool they found most beneficial and least beneficial. The average ratings for these tools can be seen in the graph below. The standard deviations for these responses where quite large, ranging from 1.8 to 3.0, which to me indicated that these students varied greatly on the tools they appreciated, which should be expected since these tools target a wide range of learning styles. However, I will note that I inadvertently left out one of the most important tools - the textbook. It would have been great to see if there was a correlation between students who valued the lecture videos as little to no benefit but highly valued the textbook, and would be something I look into next year. And while the overall averages may seem disheartening at first glance (particularly the POGIL workbook and video lectures), reading the students comments have been very reassuring; so I wanted to take a moment and discuss some of the common disparities between student perceived gains/values and instructor perceived gains/values that I noticed as a result of this assessment.   In their comments students asked me to: Improve lecture videos (so that they are) strong enough to stand on their own w/o needing text" So okay, yes I admit, I took the "good enough" approach this semester because I had over 25 video lectures to make in less than 13 weeks, I do see reflection of that approach in the student evaluations and am planning to revamp a number of the lecture videos this summer and next fall to incorporate interactive features such as questions, polling, and feedback, but I do not want my lectures to ever be good enough to stand alone. I want to encourage my students to continually seek out a variety of resources and to never be quite satisfied so that they keep trying to learn more. As an instructor whose primary goal is to create life-long learners, I am actually encouraged with the student quote above because it indicates that he or she wanted to learn more. That being said, I am learning that it is important in the flipped classroom to constantly remind my students that the lecture videos (as they currently are now) would have been identical to me lecturing at a podium for an hour in a traditional lecture, but now they can pause, rewind, and fast forward as often as they wish, and access these videos throughout the entire semester; and that in traditional lectures, the classroom lecture is meant to help clarify and supplement the required text reading. And, as I said, there was a wide range of disparity in the student valuation of the videos which was reflected in their comments from "The lecture powerpoints and videos were beneficial because it helped identify the most important points from the chapter" to "More in class lecture, flipped classes are very confusing and do not allow the professor to lecture to the students the knowledge they need".  "POGIL - some concepts, actually most, were too complicated for the scope of this course" The POGIL workbook, surprisingly to me, was one of the least valued tools by the students. Based on the comments, the students were frustrated both at the level of challenge and that there was no answer key given at the end.  Again, I believe I need to be clearer about the overall purpose of utilizing POGIL activities in the classroom; however, I believe students will always be frustrated and uncomfortable when challenged and it is important to teach them (especially a class made up of 99% pre-med majors) that they will not be given an answer key on the job. As I was reading over the POGIL "How-To"  I ran across this statement :  Students are missing  the experience of science as the  exchange and evolution of ideas, and gender and ethnic issues are being ignored in the design of  courses. Poor performers withdraw from learning, and even the best performers may disengage  because they are not challenged. The results are low levels of learning and high levels of  attrition...  To address this situation and to help students become better learners in our courses, it is  essential to recognize that education has two components, content and process, and that  the process component often is not given adequate attention. Science education needs to be  concerned equally with both the structure of knowledge, which is the content component, and  with the development of the skills for acquiring, applying, and generating knowledge, which  is the process component."  I believe to help our students become better at processing the knowledge they gain from lecture, we have to push our students hard, make them uncomfortable,  and challenge them. Therefore, when I was reading these comments such as "they weren't beneficial because there weren't clear answers, and they were pretty extreme cases, some really hard to understand" , actually pleases me as an instructor to no end. But I will agree with the students in that it is important to incorporate some sort of post-activity reflection/discussion, and I will be spending time during the Holiday break figuring out how to do this given the in-class time  constraints (and, as always, am open to suggestions from my colleagues) . "I think the class should be more lecture based. While the flipped idea is fun, I think that for a class with this much information, we need a lecture" This is actually one of my favorite quotes. While I couldn't agree more that an undergraduate biochemistry course meant to prepare both pre-med and pre-graduate students for their post-baccalaureate careers does cover an immense amount of material, I believe this, in particular, is one of the biggest reasons this course begs to be flipped. By incorporating engaging lecture videos (yes something I need to work on), text readings, and challenging/provoking in class activities, we as flipped instructors, can encourage  our students not only to gain fundamental knowledge they need to "make the grade" but to develop the skills they need in order to apply that knowledge critically allowing them to derive new connections and new ideas in their future careers.  At BSC, our mission statement specifically says "Birmingham-Southern College prepares men and women for lives of significance. The College fosters intellectual and personal development through excellence in teaching and scholarship and by challenging students to engage their community and the greater world, to examine diverse perspectives, and to live with integrity."   If I were to simply " concentrate on the things we absolutely have to know"   as some of my students have request, I would not be living up to the expectations of the college, and even to the students themselves. While flipping the class, such as a biochemistry course, may not seem to have instant gratification for the instructor, I do believe my students will (eventually) see the benefit of this course. In the meantime, let us continue to teach, assess, reflect, and modify!! ... View more

[Originally published July 10, 2015] Doug Schirch teaches chemistry at Goshen College in Indiana. Recently, he wrote to me:   I've been following your helpful website since about the beginning of the year, when I started flipping the second half our GOB course for nursing majors. After only a couple weeks into the course I could see that this really worked better, especially for this course. That held true to the end of the semester when the students took the standardized ACS exam and responded to questions I asked them on their course evaluations. I then gave a presentation to the faculty at my college, which was well-received. I've made a video-Power Point presentation of why I made the switch, what I did, and how it worked out for me. Perhaps this will be of help to others. Doug's video (22 min) is available below: Video Link : 1829 ... View more

[originally posted fall 2014] About one year ago, I heard Gabriela Weaver present the results of a detailed study on the use of the flipped classroom in the majors chemistry course at Purdue. The course had been taught in the traditional format in fall, moving to the flipped format in spring with a different instructor, and the results overall were impressive. Her excellent seminar left me with two thoughts – first, that we should implement the flipped class at Marquette, and second, that it would be possible (and seemed best) to test the efficacy of the flipped class in a side-by-side comparison of lecture and flipped courses in our General Chemistry program. Thus began what I call the Flipped Classroom Project at Marquette. And so, in spring 2015 I will be teaching two sections of our General Chemistry 2 course, one in a traditional format (to some 200 students at 8 am) and a second in a flipped format (to around 120 students). The students will be given common exams, and while students are self-selecting into the courses as I write, all of the entering students will have taken the first-semester ACS exam, therefore benchmarking their entry point. Already there is a bit of a “buzz” around the flipped class, as I piloted this concept in our off-semester Gen Chem 2 course (around 70 students) this fall, and the two courses seem about equal in popularity in early enrollment. In upcoming posts I will share my experiences this semester, and what I’ve learned in implementing the flipped classroom concept. I would be thrilled to hear your suggestions on ways to implement this project so that the most meaningful data can be obtained, and any questions you might have. Thanks for reading! ... View more

[originally posted spring 2015] This spring, I’m teaching one of my favorite courses: Intro Chem. It’s an evening class, two nights a week, 144 students. The class is a requirement for a number of applied science majors. Many students are nervous about taking chemistry, and some have put it off until their senior year. This year, I’ve had some time to reflect on what has (and hasn’t) worked in the past, I’ve gathered ideas from many of you. I’m re-designing the course, with several innovations. Over the next couple of weeks, I’m planning to write in more detail about some of these. For new, here’s a broad overview of a couple of them: Beta-testing the REEF clicker system I’ve never used a clicker system before, but the evidence suggests it makes a big difference, especially for large classes. The REEF polling system is the next-generation of I>clicker, and is set to premiere for real in the fall. It’s an app-based, bring-your-own-device system. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works – if any of your clicker veterans have suggestions, I’d love to hear them! Using my own book I’m in the process of writing my own textbook, with the first 10 chapters (of 13) in the review stage. This semester, I’m making the chapters available to the students in PDF form. This will give me a chance to see how it works in-class, and polish the organization a little bit. Rethinking the out-of-class content The organization of the new text is a little different than what I used last year. As a result, I’m having to re-do and re-think some of the video content. One of the things I’m doing is giving students the option of reading OR watching the video – I think this appeals to different learning styles. For example, here’s my Canvas page for Wednesday: With the video content, I’ve decided to focus primarily on big-picture topics, giving an overview of why the topic is important, then including the key ideas. Practice problems will be handled in class. For example, here’s a new video I prepared on units, precision, accuracy, and significant digits. It sets the stage for the in-class materials, such as calculations involving sig figs. https://vimeo.com/album/4086381/video/86152564 I’m going to have to come to grips with my perfectionist streak. The video above took way too long to produce. Moving forward, I’m going to have to be content with simpler formats, and non-scripted, tablet annotations rather than extensive PowerPoint annotations. I love producing these, but I don’t know if they’re feasible for the whole semester. ... View more

[originally posted spring 2015] Heath Giesbrecht teaches at Houston Community College, and who has produced over 1100 videos for his classes.  His YouTube channel, ProfessorHeath, is a valuable resource for flipped classrooms in first- and second-year chemistry.  In the earlier posts in this series, Heath wrote about video production, and about tailoring class presentations to different learning styles.  In this final installment, we shift to a discussion of in-class procedures: Which of your classes do you flip? Introductory Chemistry, General Chemistry I and II, and Organic I can all be flipped solely with the video content I have created. I am also working on completing the set of Organic II videos and I envision that I will be able to flip it within the next couple of semesters. How do you handle textbooks? Are they central to your class? The textbook is definitely central to the class. I prefer the students to come to class prepared by having read the section in the text that we will cover beforehand. Usually, after a few weeks, the student will be diligent in reading the textbook, but they are often still having a hard time understanding how to apply the information. It is at that point they usually start to ask to increase the time allotted for problem solving and cut down on formal lecture time. Essentially flipping the class for me. How do you handle the flipped portion of the class? Do you direct the problem solving yourself, or is it more heavily group work?  What’s the classroom dynamic?    In handling the flipped portion of the class, I have written extra problem sets that are lecture specific. After formal lecture, for the 25 students in the class I put them in groups of 5 and give each a problem set; at this time I walk around and answer questions. It reminds me a lot of my recitation sections as a TA back in grad school, where the instructor is on the front-line helping the student actualize his/her potential.   It is this atmosphere of peer-to-peer idea generation and collaboration that is the most exciting part of the class period, and the students respond with enthusiasm. It allows students to bounce concepts off of their classmates before coming to a collective decision on a problem without the fear of having their grade marked down. It also allows me the opportunity to identify common student misconceptions and errors in logic, which are almost impossible to discover when holding a traditional lecture. Easily corrected problems are resolved, and the students feel more confident going into the exams. It is especially helpful because the student is immediately reinforcing concepts that they were recently exposed to in lecture, and previously through reading the text. The classroom transforms into learning space, for both the students and the instructor.   In the traditional format, we take that practice time away from the students when we lecture at them, removing the autonomy that is essential to human trial and error type learning. Traditionally, the only chance for students to get critical feedback with their work is through graded assessments, or attending office hours. Often this is too late, not only for the student to correct their errors, but for the instructor to recount the lecture material in full to the student. Additionally, a bad assessment is unforgiving when it comes to diminishing student enthusiasm. Giving the student the chance to learn because they got something right (the quintessential “light bulb moment”) or wrong in an environment conducive to learning is essential for their future confidence and autonomy. ... View more