The inverted or flipped method to teaching has one disadvantage: when viewing a screencast at home (or in Starbucks?) you are likely to get more distracted then when listening to a traditional lecture in the classroom: a girl-/or boyfriend may call, a sibling demands attention, loud music may start blaring, etc., etc. And when you focus on the study topics again, you may be inclined to continue without making sure that you really understood what you viewed before you got interrupted.
Have you heard the maxim that the best way to learn a subject matter is to teach it? There is indeed a lot of literature that supports this “Learning by Teaching” concept. (Google it!) Our Flip-Flop method puts this “Learning by Teaching” concept into practice. The idea is that students MAKE quizzes that are synchronized with the screencasts. To make a multiple-choice quiz, you need to come up with a good question that is related to the screencast, as well as with a correct answer and one or more incorrect ones. Moreover, our software encourages you to supply a feedback for each answer, e.g., why it is correct, or what is the likely misconception that led to selecting the incorrect answer. In addition, you are encouraged to supply a short hint text and add to it a link button that leads to another web page, e.g., where the question an answer are discussed in more detail. Obviously, constructing a quiz is “teaching” and making a quiz requires more in depth understanding of the screencast than just watching it. In general, asking questions is a good practice, which can even result in questioning the correctness of the commonly accepted wisdom. Also, formulating a short hint text is a good, even a bit of ‘writing intensive’ practice. Finally, searching the web for a good link that explains a topic is arguably a skill that will come handy beyond just our course.
Obviously once you have created a quiz, other students can then TAKE your quiz. The entire screencast is split into as many pieces/segments as there are students in a group and each student in the group gets assigned another segment to make a quiz from. Thus you will either make a quiz or take a quiz from the entire screencast so that you get deeply involved with the entire video.
Our software will help you with some of the more tedious tasks, e.g. splitting up the segment into individual tasks (aka questions) and adding a few poll-type of questions that allow your peers to evaluate the quiz they just took.
We will begin using the Flip-Flop quizzes within a few weeks after the beginning of the semester.