Campus Technology shares a thoughtful first-person perspective piece by an instructor who has been deeply involved with flipped and active learning for a number of years. While technology can certainly help generate efficiencies for instructors and learners alike, it’s not always that simple to build your own course and figure out appropriate student engagement models.

First, the positives:

In the past four years, I’ve guest-blogged on flipped learning, published on the topic and I’ve presented my model for flipped college courses regionally and nationally. I end every publication and every talk with the catchphrase “I’ll never teach another way again,” and I mean it. Students learn more deeply, more effectively, and they integrate material much more through a flipped/active learning format than with more traditional, lecture-based instruction. To teach in any other way, to me, seems almost unethical — especially given how much money today’s college student spends on his/her education.

But in the absence of technology that appropriately supports the instructor by providing automated scoring and personalized guidance to students, the workload can get quite daunting (and exhausting):

Each week ends with a take-home quiz to be turned in at the start of the next week. This is a total of four assignments per student, per week. And, as we all know, students take their work far more seriously when they know that it will be thoroughly read, assessed and graded by the instructor. So, I read each and every assignment, grade it and provide personalized feedback to each student. This semester, I had 86 students spread across four courses; a fairly typical teaching load at an institution like mine. Eighty-six students, each submitting four assignments a week — that’s 344 assignments each week or 3,784 assignments this semester…

In our work with hundreds of instructors at dozens of institutions across the country it’s never a question of motivation or desire to help students learn and improve, that’s a given. But often institutions lose sight of the fact that much of the course-specific technology that optimizes a single portion of the workflow – for example assignment and assessment, or attendance – introduces additional load on instructors without generating commensurate value or efficiency. Tightly integrated, easy-to-use, solutions that can automatically comb student interaction and performance data, segregate disengaged from struggling (or even high-achieving) students and then regularly reach out to those groups with relatable messaging to propel engagement and provide support are increasingly required. It’s why we built Junction Beacon over a year ago – to shift load off of instructors so that they can focus on helping students learn instead of trying to analyze charts, graphs and tables.

Soon, gone will be the days of instructors arriving to a lecture hall, delivering a 75-minute speech and leaving. Gone will be the days of midterms and finals being the sole forms of assessing student learning. For me, these days have already passed, and good riddance. These are largely ineffective teaching and learning strategies. Today’s college classroom is becoming dynamic, active and student-centered. Additionally, the learning never stops because the dialogue between student and instructor persists endlessly over the internet. Trust me when I say that this can be exhausting.

Helping instructors to help students, check out Junction for more details on how we can help with the transition to flipped and active learning.

The Hidden Costs of Active Learning — Campus Technology

Viewpoint Flipped and active learning truly are a better way for students to learn, but they also may be a fast track to instructor burnout. I am an active learning college instructor and I’m tired. I don’t mean end-of-the-semester and need-some-sleep tired. I mean really, weary, bone-deep tired.