A new take on teaching

Flip the classroom. What does it mean? An immediate thought is that the teacher is somehow seated in the back row while a student teaches a class from the podium. But that’s not really it.

David Umphress, an award-winning faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, likes to think of flipping the classroom as inverting the traditional process of learning while sitting in your seat and taking notes.

While there is no single, all-encompassing definition of the term, in the inverted, or flipped, classroom students are encouraged to learn outside the walls and take a more interactive, problem-solving approach during the hours they meet in class.

“Some faculty members have described their own experience as being as much a listener in class as a lecturer, and in some ways this captures the flavor of a flipped classroom,” Umphress observes. “Sometimes, in class, I think of myself as more of a consultant than a teacher. That’s how it feels.”

One of the classes that Umphress teaches is software engineering for wireless devices, in which students learn to design Android apps. He typically plans a week with Monday and Wednesday classes treated as lectures where software concepts are described, often with videos and screen casts that capture and project what’s on his computer in real time. On Friday, the class is flipped and the concepts that were learned earlier in the week are applied and mastered.

“We have some very specific objectives in this class, which lends itself to this approach,” Umphress notes. “We look at it as directed problem solving with the goal of finding ways for users to interact with their Android devices.”

He notes that Android platforms lend themselves to this kind of approach because they are programmed in Java, a readily available source code that is easy for students to work within a learning environment.

“You can only go through so much program code before your eyes begin to glaze,” he jokes. “We have found this to be a very workable way of teaching because we are not reinventing code, but making incremental changes.”

The approach in which Umphress has found success is to challenge his students with a large project, and to break it down into smaller components from week to week. He provides them with links related to the work, and lets them surf the web for solutions. He makes himself available to help students over the roadblocks that routinely occur during the process.
“This kind of strategy lets them research the problem and find out what they need to know about the code and how it is written,” Umphress explains. “It is always my goal to get them to go through this process until something clicks, and they find a successful solution.”

Umphress says that he has learned a lot during the process of flipping the classroom.

“It’s not easy to do this,” he comments. “There is a lot more preparation time involved with this approach, and you have to face the fact that some students are not culturally prepared to work in this way.

“Some students feel that you should talk in class, and work outside of it, which, again, is the traditional approach. They can feel as if they are put on the spot if they have to come up with the kinds of answers we are looking for in this new paradigm.”

The hybrid, or blended, approach that Umphress favors helps to alleviate some of this feeling in students who are used to the traditional manner of teaching.

“I think that the greater expectations that we place on these students will result in better graduates, because when they are in the job force, they will be essentially following this model in their career.“

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