Looking at the huge success of Khan Academy and Stanford Online Classroom Programs (SCPD, campus-class and ones in pipeline like Coursera, Udacity and Dkandu!? :P), inverted classroom is something that is being tried out for the first time this quarter.
What is inverted classroom model? There are no classes. A bunch of lecture videos are uploaded online every week. There are in-video quizzes that pop-up (like YouTube ads! :) ) to make sure you are up to speed (read, to make sure you are not asleep). Apart from that, you get a weekly dose of graded quizzes, problem sets and programming assignments all of which you submit online. Optional interaction sessions are held once a week where you can discuss course material/assignments with faculty, TAs and more importantly other students.
What's 'inverted' about this model? - In a normal class, you learn the subject 1-way in class while 2-way discussions happen outside the classroom, for example, in your dorms. On the other hand, with this model, you learn the subject at home while the 2-way discussions can happen in classroom during classroom interaction sessions.
Having experienced this model for last two months, here is my take on its success:
Upsides:
- Flexibility! Course doesn't clash with anything. You (and the instructors :D) don't have to wake up early for lectures. You can watch the videos whenever you feel like! At the same time, weekly assignments make sure that you are up to speed.
- You can learn at your own pace. Substitute for "Can you please go over the last slide once more?" is simple! In fact, instructors tend to be more lucid since they have a liberty of uploading 4-hrs of videos every week instead of having to stick to 2.5 classroom hours :D
- Highly active discussion forum! This is what happens when you can't raise your hand in the class :D A pleasant break from "You can use moodle/courswork for discussion", which never happens. I see this as an upside since everything gets documented. In fact, there are additional things like course wiki, which students happily contribute to.
- Novelty :P
- The courses also run for external audience. So anyone in the world can learn the subject sitting at his/her home for FREE! Yes, you don't even have to pay Stanford's hefty tuition fees and housing rents like me :P
Downsides:
You don't get to meet the like-minded people face-to-face which you would have otherwise. People posting on facebook about the joke instructor cracked in the video lecture and ending it with :D does not match the classroom full of laughter.
Agreed that it's much more efficient way to learn the course material, but is that the only reason we go to school? Classrooms are fun! Remember BGF? who says "Are you with me?" and then claps three times :D How about paro? who will never be the same if we watch her lectures at 0.7x :P Remember those HSS lectures? where we used to count the number of times prof uses "so", "what" and "only". Damn, cellphones can't ring in Manjunath's video lectures!! How about the sheer joy of clapping in Chandorkar's classes? Where will the thunder of 'surprise quizzes' go?! Gota's "Sir sir sir, I have a question" will be missed thoroughly :D There will be no back-benchers, no late comers :D Noooo, I can't imagine going to such a boring school :P
Anyhow, can't help it. The very concept that you can learn a subject from the best person in the field who may be thousands of miles away or probably retired or even dead is revolutionary for sure. 'Books' of new era, so to say!
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