The semester has started and I’m already sprinting full speed to keep up. My grand vision of having all my video lectures recorded before the first day of class (so I could spend more time focusing on improving the ACTIVITIES we do during class time) has been effectively filed in the “popped bubble” category of my life.
But I have received so much positive feedback this week that I’m cool with the popped bubble (and very willing to keep sprinting to pull it all off).
My first class was Monday. I met my posse of new students during “lecture” Monday morning. I saw them all again later in the day, for their first lab. I administered a quiz at the end of the lab on anatomical terminology and I included two anonymous survey questions at the top of the quiz: “Do you like this class?” and “Do you like the flip?” I asked students to answer each question using a scale of 1-5. The results of this survey provide a reference point from which to analyze class climate.
Do you like this class?
|
Yes! |
Mostly… |
Whatever |
Not really…. |
NO!! |
|
79% |
18% |
4% |
0% |
0% |
Do you like the flip?
|
Yes! |
Mostly… |
Whatever |
Not really…. |
NO!! |
|
77% |
13% |
9% |
0% |
0% |
I tend to be a “glass-half-full” kind of gal, but these survey results really are optimistic. Only 9% of my students, on day one, feel even indifferent about flipping the course. None of them are negative about it. Now, I certainly am under no illusion that these numbers will stay the same as the course proceeds. I am confident that as students experience the challenging nature of Human Anatomy, they will become more critical of my methods. But this certainly is an interesting baseline and I look forward to seeing how the numbers change as the semester progresses.
On the other hand, perhaps I have a particularly positive and motivated group of students this semester. I already have some evidence that this might be the case. Wednesday (day two of my class), there was a campus-wide power outage. Most of my students had already arrived at the lecture hall to discover that we’d all been locked out of the buildings (by the electric locks!) Lecture was cancelled, but we were told that lab might not be. 75% of my students gathered at the picnic tables outside the lecture hall and we held a flipped class anyway. I didn’t get to use my cool new clicker questions, but we actually had nice, low tech flipped class in some rare Humboldt County sunshine.
I’m blowing a new bubble. I think this is going to be a good semester.