Winter Webinar Recap: Benefits of Flipping Your Classroom
Are you curious about flipping a course or improving your flipped course? Are you worried you would end up flopping? Dr. Thomas Braun discusses his iterative experiences with a flipped introductory level biostatistics course at the University of Michigan in this webinar: “Biostatistics for Public Health Students: What Benefits Does a ‘Flipped’ Classroom Have?”.
Dr. Braun teaches his introductory biostatistics course to a large audience of more than 200 students with a wide range of math backgrounds. In his webinar, we see a great example of an instructor aligning a class with the recommendations of the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report.
In his traditional classroom approach, Dr. Braun delivered two 90-minute lectures per week focused on deriving formulas, computing test statistics by hand, and finding p-values in tables with limited time spent on the interpretation of results. He assigned one homework assignment and one 60-minute computer lab per week.
Making the Flip
In his first attempt at a flipped online classroom approach, Dr. Braun designed eight modules covering study design and types of data, visual and numerical summaries of data, sampling concepts, the normal distribution and the central limit theorem, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing for continuous outcomes (t-tests and ANOVA), hypothesis testing for categorical outcomes (chi-square), correlation and simple linear regression. He describes the process of making this syllabus change, as well as how he now uses videos, quizzes, small-class problem sets, and large-class paper reviews. For a class of 200 students, this requires support from teaching assistants.
Here are some resources mentioned in the webinar:
Contemporary public health datasets were taken from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and General Social Survey (GSS)
Manuscripts for review were taken from the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH)
Poll Everywhere was used to measure student learning and motivate conversations in the course
Iterative Improvement
What is intriguing about this webinar, though not unexpected of a statistician, is that Dr. Braun reviews the many data points observed to assess this change in teaching style. Data were not only collected from student feedback, but also from the online software used to house the course materials. At the end of the first term, about 50% of the students agreed that the video lectures were a useful component for their learning and about 50% agreed that the in-class exercises were useful. Patterns also emerged in the time spent doing online work, as well as the day and time it was done.
Dr. Braun explains how these data led to reworking the videos, revising quiz point allocation, and more time spent introducing the course format at the start of the term. He also tried incorporating R programming. By the end of the second term, almost 80% of the students agreed that the video lectures were a useful component for their learning and 76% agreed that the in-class exercises were useful. At the end of the presentation and during the Q&A time, further revisions to the course are discussed.
Lessons Learned
Maintain clear communication with students
Capture and clearly explain everything of importance in the videos
Make quizzes small stakes, so students do not agonize over them and lose their learning value
Use genuinely interesting articles and examples
Give students options when it comes to software
So, what of the third term? There is evidence of improvement from the traditional classroom. Dr. Braun questions whether others will use his videos to teach this course while he is on sabbatical since there has been hesitation among his colleagues who have a different style. He wonders if qualified graduate students can be reliably found to serve as assistant instructors. How would you feel stepping into this type of course director role? Would these shoes fit your feet? We welcome your thoughts in the comments below.