FLIPPED CLASSROOMS: HELPING HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS TO BUILD ON EACH OTHER'S EXPERIENCES

The flipped classroom is a type of blended learning that allows teachers to combine online and face-to-face teaching elements for best possible effect. In the Netherlands, a large-scale incentive scheme has been in place for several years, encouraging higher education institutions to explore the benefits of online education in their own context. This has resulted in a number of projects, some of which use the ‘flipping the classroom’ approach.

How can we support higher education institutions to share their experiences and continue building on them, instead of inventing the wheel all over again? SURF developed a blended course (practice as you preach!) in which higher education management staff can learn from the experiences of the projects that have been supported through the national incentive scheme. In the blended course, they choose a coach to stay in contact with them throughout the course. After an initial face-to-face session they follow the online course, which presents 9 different flipped classroom projects that have run at Dutch higher education institutions. Participants are challenged to reflect on these practices and write down in a digital notebook whether they think these are good examples that would work in their own educational context as well, and why or why not. The course leads to the development of a rough idea on how flipped classroom techniques could be applied best in each participant’s institution. The coach gives feedback on each participant’s work or arranges peer feedback between the participants.

In this presentation at IATED, a representative of SURF will give a short demonstration of the blended course about flipped classrooms in Dutch higher education institutions and report on the experiences of the first run of the course, in the spring of 2018.