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Take a Walk on the Flip Side – How to Effectively Incorporate Flipped Learning into Undergraduate and Vocational Law Teaching.
Rachel Cooper
I was looking forward to a train journey through the foothills of the Pennines on a crisp sunlit December morning but all I got was gloom. In needed inspiration and, as I found, I was headed in the right direction. The Studio was bright, welcoming, and had a creative vibe. It felt like a good place to be…..
Take a Walk on the Flip Side – How to Effectively Incorporate Flipped Learning into Undergraduate and Vocational Law Teaching.
I presented this ‘how to’ workshop with my colleague Gareth Bramley and we were keen to share with others our experience of implementing flip learning in two different contexts, one tried and tested and one more recent. To maintain a practical focus we gave only a brief overview of our understanding of what flip learning means, in essence it reverses the traditional approach of lecture driven passive learning so that the students carry out research and reading prior to the taught sessions which focus on student centred active learning. For a more in depth discussion there is a lot of interesting literature and studies and there is no better place to start than with the HEA .
We then moved onto to share how we flip on a postgraduate, vocational course, the Legal Practice Course. We highlighted the combination of learning technologies (including the specific tools e.g. Articulate, Quizmaker) that we use to promote student engagement with the learning process outside of the classroom setting, many of which were familiar to our audience. Our key message here was that we find that using a variety of learning technologies helps maintain good levels of student motivation and engagement with the work that they have to complete prior to contact time. We made the observation that in our experience, the screencast is a particularly useful tool for providing an overview and guidance and is popular with the students as it is a re-useable resource which can be an effective tool in helping the students structure the independent learning expected of them in the flipped learning model of delivery.
To illustrate this point we displayed a screenshot of a typical page from our VLE showing links to a blend of e-learning activities the students are required to complete prior to one teaching session. This included a complete the blanks exercise, a screencast and a quiz, successful completion of which was conditional on a resource being made available which would enable the students to check their understanding of the work they have done.
To put the e-learning activities into context within the course and to demonstrate what materials are required to enable the students to navigate online materials and a flipped course more generally, we handed out an example of some hard copy materials that we produce to accompany our course. Having hard copy materials available meant that we were able to share examp