As I am preparing for the Summer Session, it has
started to dawn on me that I had not really considered how much effort is involved
in changing from a largely traditional mode of teaching to a flipped classroom.
And while I am still committed to these changes, I understand better why I have
never done this before, and why so few adjunct would take the time to do this.
I am going to be putting in many hours of prep-work, none of which will I be
compensated for. If I was a full time instructor at least some of the work
could be done during my on-campus office hours.
The first obstacle that I have really encountered is
preparing some type of lecture material for the students to view outside of
class. In order to simplify things the first thing I did was go to the online
material provided by the publisher. In reviewing the material provided for the
PreAlgebra review was unimpressive. I will tell students it’s available, but I
will be surprised if the students use it. So now I need to look at how I can
record lectures and make them available to students.
I have connected with the person on campus who does
tape and post lectures for professors who do online classes, but he is really
busy and I’m not sure how much we will be able to do. He is going to talk to
his supervisor and get back in touch with me so we can see what we can get done
between now and the start of Summer. I am going to see if I can tape and upload
lectures myself. The only trick there will be finding a place, as the main part
of the library will be closed for the next three weeks.
The other thing I realized is that I am going to need
to prepare the students for what is going to be going on. Since this is not
going to be a “normal” class, I should probably warn students before they walk
in the door. First thing I am going to do is send everyone an email a week
before the semester starts explaining what we are going to be doing. I am also
giving them a check list of things to do to make sure they are ready to go on
the first day. I am also going to have to completely rewrite my syllabus and
redesign how I will be grading students.
One of the things I am also looking at is using
problems from Mathematics Teacher for the classroom work, or designing some of
my own, so that I don’t become just a different version of the professor who
hands out worksheets for students to work on. If I can make at least one
interesting project per chapter, I think that will help a lot.
Next week I will have more projects to share.
If you have any classroom projects that you have done
for Elementary Algebra (Algebra I) I would be very interested in hearing about them.
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