Page 20 - 2016Summer

Designing Active Learning Environments
produce an Olympic opening ceremony pageant. There are many ways to capture synchronous screen and audio recordings. One author (KEW) employs the Doodlecast iPad app (http://doodlecastpro.com) with a wired clip-on microphone. Another author (JRB) uses the TechSmith (https://www.techsmith.com) capture software with a writing tablet, whiteboard program, and wired headset. The Khan Academy FAQ (https://goo.gl/9S7Lw2) lists the equipment Sal Khan uses to make his videos. Inspired by Sal Khan’s comments (2013), we also choose not to edit our videos but leave our self-corrections in the recordings, rein- forcing the informal in-person style. Students’ responses to the videos were largely positive right from the start, rough as our early efforts appear to us now.
YouTube analytics confirm that students devote consider- able time to watching the videos. YouTube does not provide individual students’ viewing data but does report aggregate viewing by state as a function of time. We use this aggregate data from our university’s home state during the dates of the semester as our best estimate of total viewing data. The com- bined Massachusetts viewers during the Fall 2013, Fall 2014, and Fall 2015 semesters spent 24,750 minutes watching videos on the ProfJohnBuck channel (https://goo.gl/EoPQpG). The combined enrollment of the UMass Dartmouth linear sys- tems classes during these three semesters was 189 students, yielding a rough estimate of 130 minutes/student of view- ing. For a class that meets 150 minutes/week, this average represents nearly a week of additional instructional time. Although we cannot be certain that all the Massachusetts viewers are students in these classes, the strong correlation between the YouTube time series and assignment due dates (Figure 6) suggests that the viewing data are predominantly students. End of semester evaluations for these three semes- ters also support this interpretation. For each semester, at least 60% of the students reported watching “some,” “most,”
Figure 6. Daily viewing of the ProfJohnBuck YouTube chan- nel during the Fall 2014 se- mester with an enrollment of 67 students. The viewing data clearly show a strong signal in a seven-day period, consistent with the weekly homework due every Tuesday. The exams on 10/7, 11/4, and 12/15 in- creased student viewing.
or “all” of the videos, and at least 75% of the students re- ported that the videos were “helpful” or “very helpful.”
An unanticipated dividend to recording these videos is their popularity with a broader audience. The combined worldwide viewing for the ProfKathleenWage (https://goo.gl/4eER4C) and ProfJohnBuck channels over the last 30 months exceeds 500,000 minutes.
Although some instructors in flipped classrooms deliver all of the preclass preparation via video lectures, we remain conflicted about completely removing reading from our courses. Our sense is that most of our students would prefer to watch a video than read a textbook. However, we strongly believe that technical reading skills are essential, and we are concerned that requiring viewing without any reading will not equip our students with the self-directed learning skills required for long-term success.
The Road Forward
Where to go from here? If you are skeptical of the empirical evidence for active learning provided by Hake (1998), Buck and Wage (2005), and Freeman et al. (2014), then find a con- cept inventory for your course (Foundation Coalition, 2008) and administer it using the pre-/post- protocol described above. If there isn’t a concept inventory for your area, read the FCI or SSCI to get a feel for how CIs work, then write a few conceptual questions of your own and give them to your students. Listen to your students’ explanations of their answers and learn what misconceptions they still retain after taking your course. We’ve done this exercise ourselves, and it was eye opening.
If you are convinced by Hake (1998) and Freeman et al. (2014) or intrigued by our description of active learning, there are a number of ways to get started. One of us started by assigning a short “warm-up” problem at the beginning
18 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2016