This feels like some sort of joke – a flipped classroom walks into a bar and starts talking to a MOOC….
Here’s the quote:
“The use of videos with quizzes puts the learning directly in students’ hands,” said Gries. “If they don’t understand a concept, they can re-watch the videos and take the quizzes again. This allows students to learn at their own pace. It is exciting.”
I’m almost positive that was taken out of context, but if not, watching a video again, or taking a quiz again, in and of itself is not learning. It’s not good learning design, it’s not good thinking, it’s just drill and repeat in another form. It’s drill and repeat, at the student’s command…
I’m purposefully ignoring the good stuff that happens in this article, like the 8% grade increase (which is being attributed to the flipped model, but could just be the students in the class are better than the previous years, maybe the class size was smaller, leading to better instructional opportunities…). I also find it curious that the University of Toronto could find no student to add their voice to this puff piece. Undoubtedly, something is here – but what it is really isn’t shared in this piece. It will be interesting to see if any research is accomplished on this over the next few years.
This isn’t the first time that people have repurposed Coursera or other xMOOC platform content as elements of a flipped classroom. It strikes me that if this approach takes hold, all education has done with these MOOCs is that they’ve created another set of publishers with a repository of content. If so, the future of MOOCs (as content repositories) is pretty grim.