Speaker 1: What I want you to do is I want you to read part two. Read part two and then I want you to work in groups of three or four people to answer the questions at the end of part two and then we're going to stop and I'm going to ask you what the answers are to those parts. I've been teaching here at Emory for about 15 years and teaching biology to many students. I decided to go ahead and try something a little bit different this semester to teach biochemistry to a large sections of about 80 students. So what I decided to go ahead and do this semester is to use the flip format which allows the students to interact with each other in class. Instead of lecturing in class now students are doing case studies. They're working through online problems that I'm showing them and they're working together in groups of two to four students and this allows for them to apply the information that they've learned in the lectures that I've previously recorded. Video production teams of the Faculty Services Division and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship work with me to produce a full semester of video lecture content. This ended up being about 15 separate lectures each about 70 minutes long and each lecture was broken down into about 10 to 15 minute segments. One big advantage of using video is that lectures are extremely accurate because you can do multiple takes and stitch these together via editing. Here's a brief little excerpt of me teaching about DNA structure. Let's apply some of the information that you've gleaned about nucleotide structure to see if we can do a little mental sequencing. Looking at this base pair down here at the bottom of this DNA molecule you can see that there are three hydrogen bonds that connect this base pair. The other piece of information that we can glean here is that we've got one ring that is on this side of this base pair. Using those two pieces of information you should be able to determine the nucleotide that I'm pointing to right here. There was a little bit of a difficulty initially teaching to a camera because there's no interactivity. So in class when I teach the students are constantly stopping me and asking me questions and there's a natural kind of stop and go flow to the class. With a camera you kind of have to create that for yourself and what we did at several points within these videos is we had little questions that were posed to the students that the students had to stop and answer as they went through and watched the video. And what we're going to do is we're going to start with this nucleotide and we're going to go up. What I'd like you to do is to write down the nucleotides as we go up and to sequence the DNA as we go through. Okay, what do you think? Students talk amongst themselves and work through exercises and case studies. I'm able to walk around in class and help students that might need a one-on-one type of help and this isn't something typical that you would expect to find in a lecture model where you're strictly lecturing to the students. One of the issues that people bring up about using this type of model is that educators are worried about students attending the class as if they have lectures that they can watch outside of class. Why come to lectures? But it was my experience that a lot of students did come to class. In fact, I believe that more students were coming to class in the flipped model than in the traditional lecture model. So this interactivity that takes place in the classroom where students are talking to each other, working together to solve problems, I think excites students and it brings more students to the class.

Speaker 2: Overall, the videos made class time a lot less stressful because I could access them before class and so I kind of knew what direction the class discussion would go in. So I would watch the videos first and I didn't have to worry about frantically taking notes during class.

Speaker 3: I was more willing to participate in class because I would have usually already known the material so I would feel more comfortable answering the questions.

Speaker 2: I make it a rule to watch each video at least three times and then on the videos where there's harder material I would go back and watch it maybe a fourth or fifth time as well.

Speaker 3: I think the most helpful thing about doing the flipped learning is being able to watch the material ahead of time and then come to class and ask questions on things that you are unfamiliar with. In classes that are not flipped learning, if you don't understand a concept in class, usually you don't really realize that you don't understand the concept until you later go back and review the material for the test. It has a bigger impact on how well you understand the material and can apply those concepts to other things.

Speaker 1: So one of the advantages of using this flipped model is it allows me to create an active learning environment in the classroom. Students can actually apply the information that they've previously studied and they can really take on some pretty good questions about medicine, the body, biological systems. They can probe these systems in more depth and really get a deeper understanding of how these systems work. They can get to the answers in collaboration with each other and I think that's a great way to learn. So I believe that I'm going to be using this flipped model in the future. There are circumstances where this is very beneficial, there are circumstances where maybe it doesn't work as well, but I believe that this is just one more tool that we educators have in our toolbox that we can use to enhance education for our Emory students.