Learning from Videos

I teach some courses as a 'flipped classroom,' where lectures happen with video podcasts you watch outside class, and discussion, Q&A, and student tasks happen during our meeting times. This is still an unusual approach in a college, and I am still perfecting the approach, but I believe it's superior to the way I used to teach lecture courses. Some students prefer it, while it does not work well for others.

Watching podcasted lectures is a new skill for many of you, and it will take some practice. Here are some pointers gleaned from earlier students’ experiences. Many students ignore this advice until mid-semester. Why not start taking it right away?

Don't just rely on the lecture outlines; take good notes and record your questions.

The lecture outlines are just a skeleton of the material. I don't just test on what is on them, and I say plenty of things that aren't printed there. I also show voiced-over graphics that aren't necessarily linked from the outline.

The outlines are there to give you a road map so you know where we are in the overall topic. You might try print out the lecture outlines, and taking notes on them or alongside while you watch. That gives you the time to capture the other things in lecture, as well as your connections, insights, and questions.

Studies show that writing your notes longhand is more effective for learning than typing them on a computer.

As questions come to you, write them down, flag them, and ask me (or classmates) in class. We can do more Q&A this way than we can in a standard lecture course.

Pause as needed and as helpful.

A luxury of recorded media is that you can pause: for a very brief break to refocus, or to discuss something with another viewer, or especially to engage a point in depth before it gets past you. If God has something for you in the middle of watching a video, don't just go on; stop there and do what you need to do before resuming. Is there something you need to think through, work out, obey, or share?

You can pause like this when reading a book too. Why would you let the moment go by?! Make room to receive what the sovereign Holy Spirit is saying.

Watch with a classmate.

This will keep you from switching over to your email or some other application. You can also (briefly!) mention or discuss important points to your partner, exchange ideas, or ask questions of clarification.

Watching in two's also forces you to schedule your viewing, which makes it more likely to happen when you're fresher.

If you watch in groups greater than two, you may tend to spend too much time pausing to discuss or repeating the last few seconds that someone missed.

Take breaks between podcasts, or even in the middle of them.

After ten minutes or so of lecturing, our brains are fatigued and ready to pause and think about something else, or even think about nothing. You may need a minute to refresh, or you may need part of a day to process an intriguing thought. With this format, you don't have to focus to an hour-long lecture delivered all at once. Take advantage of the flexibility.

Figure out the best times of your day to watch.

You have complete flexibility to watch when you like. If you watch with a classmate, you'll need to schedule it more deliberately, and you'll be less likely to fall behind or put off watching until late at night when your brain is tired and needs sleep.

Speaking of which: Late night is a poor time for learning. Watch earlier in the day when you have more energy, self-discipline, and power to concentrate.

Adjust the speed.

You can adjust the speed of the lecture to whatever works best for you. Some students watch me at 1.5x, and it works fine while saving one-third of their time. Fine with me! Just make sure you have time to process what you're hearing.

Unhappy with this approach? Think constructively.

You could think this way: “My prof is so lazy he taped his lectures and makes us watch him outside class. I’m paying for live, not recorded!” Or, “He’s making too many demands in doubling the amount of time I have to be in class.”

Here is why I don’t see it that way:

What we’re doing is saving our time together for the activities where interaction is most beneficial. And interactive learning can be really valuable. Demonstrating knowledge, teaching others, and processing together aloud are all more effective ways to learn than just listening to someone lecture.
College learning at our level assumes that you spend two hours outside class for every hour we meet together. Traditionally that time is allocated to reading, written assignments, research, and reviewing. You have fewer written assignments than students used to, because we can process together much more effectively with a fifteen-minute oral exercise in groups of two than with a written assignment that might take several hours.
The more tightly edited videos allow us to cover more topics, so you need less supplementary reading. Students have 2-4 books fewer than they did when I taught this course traditionally.
A good proportion of class time is reviewing and analyzing readings and lecture material, helping it stick and reducing the demands on your own reviewing.
I’ve been able to condense my lectures while (I think) improving clarity and quality, as well as greatly increasing my use of visuals. Perhaps that could have happened without recording and editing, but for some reason, it never did. As a result, even base-package students get 40% more lecture material than any of my students used to. Performance-package students get 67% more; sports-package students get over 100% more. You are learning a lot more than my previous students could.
We are no longer so bound to the clock. A lecture that only takes 30 minutes doesn’t have to stretch to take a whole hour; a lecture that takes 80 minutes doesn’t have to squeeze into too little time or get cut off whenever our time is up.
It’s easier to get beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to content, since not everyone has to watch the same set of lectures. Base package students can get the essentials, and more ambitious or interested students can get more.
You actually have plenty of time. Performance package students watch about 26 hours, or about 55% of our in-class time. That leaves 65 or so hours left for reading, research, writing, and reviewing. (Base package lectures are only about 23 hours; sports package lectures are 28 hours.) Speed up playback and your time shrinks further. At 1.3 times normal speed, the sports-package students are spending about the same time that base-package students spend at normal speed.
You are learning how to watch educational video. TED Talks are fascinating. Online courses are available in all kinds of subjects. You are getting practice at educating yourself through this rapidly growing new medium, which is changing the face of education.
Our in-class exercises are giving you practice articulating the Christian faith. That raises your comfort level with the material and with sharing your perspectives. Studies show that young American Christians aren’t very comfortable or experienced sharing their faith. They don’t get much of a chance when it’s the youth pastor or professional minister or professor doing all the talking!
Your oral communication skills are really important in life. In fact, they’re probably more important than writing well. Our flipped classroom gives them much more of a workout than traditional formats allow.

As for this being laziness on my part, the lazy path would just be to come to class and do the same thing I do every semester. Flipping my classroom was a whale of an effort, and it has led to more fresh thinking and innovation than I've done in years.