Why a Flipped Classroom Platform is perfect for creating online courses (in 2023)
Ishwar Sundararaman
. 14 Dec 22
4x Entrepreneur | Raised from 25+ investors | Mentored 1000+ founders | Last startup hit $7mn run rate & 100+ team
Welcome to a new way of delivering online courses, where you blend the best of the MOOCs recorded class format, with the best of live engagement, and do this all using a flipped classroom platform.
By flipping the classroom I mean making lectures available as recorded content to your students, while the classroom becomes a space for discussion and collaboration.
This is easily possible today using a flipped classroom platform such as the one offered by Unsolved.
In this post, we will be covering the following
1. What is a Flipped Classroom
2. Benefits of a Flipped Classroom for Online Courses
3. How to choose a Flipped classroom Platform
4. How to create a Flipped Online Course
What is a Flipped Classroom?
The flipped classroom is a method of teaching that flips the traditional school model on its head.
Instead of a teacher standing in front of a class forcing students to listen, in a flipped classroom the students have to pre-study before they hit the classroom.
Here the students learn by viewing recorded videos on their own, while using class time for more in-depth discussions, projects and activities.
The flipped classroom is not a new concept; it is simply a new approach to teaching, which give the student more responsibility for their own learning.
A flipped classroom platform needs technology that is a little different from what you would otherwise use while running online courses
Benefits of a Flipped Classroom Approach for your online courses
The flipped classroom model is beneficial to both teachers and students in different ways.
Benefits of a Flipped Classroom Model for Students
First, because students have already seen the lectures, they can spend class time doing more in-depth work on the topics that are covered in the lectures.
Second, students can revisit the content when they are applying it to the homework, which is often more difficult than the theoretical application of the content.
Third, the flipped classroom approach is interactive and has a ton of discussion time. It fosters student engagement with the material and with each other thus encouraging critical thinking.
Lastly one of the biggest advantages of the Flipped Classroom is the ability to provide students with a more personalized learning experience that helps them keep pace, based on their individual ability to grasp new concepts.
Benefits of a Flipped Classroom Model for Teachers
First, the flipped learning model is helpful since it frees up the teachers time from delivering the same content to different classes.
Second, It allows the teacher to focus on how the material is applied to different situations and helps teachers focus more on developing students critical thinking skills.
Lastly, The teacher can use the recorded format to deliver the lectures, and allows her to spend more time interacting with students to clear doubts and cause the application of knowledge during class time.
How to Choose a Flipped Classroom Platform
The choice of the Flipped Classroom platform primarily depends on these 3 factors.
1. Course Delivery Infrastructure
A solid content delivery system is essential to ensure that your course material can be accessed by students. The system you choose should be easy to use, reliable, and scalable.
It should allow you to deliver content in a variety of formats, including text, audio, video, and graphics.
Finally the ability to be able to track student progress and help them measure their own performance is critical too.
2. Online Student Community & Group Learning
Whenever students were asked what they sought from online courses, they always respond with the need to connect with their fellow batch mates.
This is one aspect that is missing in most online courses. If you leverage a strong community-building mechanism, to bring the real-world classroom setting to the online course, that can set your course on fire.
Students are often seeking collaborative ways to learn, share, and grow. Online student communities and group learning is a great way for students to collaborate and share their knowledge with each other.
3. Gamification & Making Learning Fun
3. Gamification & Making Learning Fun
Gamification is the use of game elements to encourage engagement, learning, and behaviours. Gamification in your Flipped learning platform should include elements like leaderboards, badges, achievements, and more.
Gamification is a great way to motivate students especially if you are using an online learning platform that is self-paced.
How to Create a Flipped Online Course?
Flipped online courses are becoming extremely popular in the education industry.
They are a great way to get your content out to a wide audience, while also being able to reach students who may not have the opportunity to attend your live webinars.
But how exactly do you create a flipped online course?
There are a few quick and easy steps that you need to pay attention to when creating your flipped online course.
1. Choose a flipped classroom platform
Here are some of the most popular platforms:
a: Canvas
b: Unsolved
c: Blackboard
d: Moodle
2. Create your Pre-Recorded video lectures
These should be short, but packed with not just information, but one key task that helps them absorb the learning. The goal is to get them to watch the video, then practice what they just learned.
You can use some online tools to record your screen, or just use an app on your phone.
Here are some free online tools that help you record your screen and camera
3: CamStudio
5: Loom
3. Create your course structure
The ideal course structure varies but a good structure broadly looks like this
a. Course Kick Off - Talk about the objective, understand outcomes desired by the students, lay down expectations of work expected from students
b. Course Overview - Share the overview of the course and course outline alongwith any material that gives them a good big picture understanding
c. Sense of Accomplishment - Make early sessions easy to understand, grasp and execute, so students believe they can do this
d. Have Live Q&A at regular intervals, so students can clarify their doubts and you can get immediate feedback
e. Easy to understand - Make sure you cover the topics and ideas that students find difficult, so even if they do not ask you questions, they at least understand them better
4. Create a community & student discussion groups
Creating a community and student discussion groups is a great way to engage with your audience.
It is a place where they can ask questions, share their thoughts and opinions, and engage with each other.
It is a place where they can ask questions, share their thoughts and opinions, and engage with each other.
Students who learn together have more accountability, lower dropout rates and more accountability.
The more you incorporate this feature, the more your students will feel involved with the course and therefore more likely to succeed.
5. Make the online course fun
One of the best ways to keep your students engaged is to keep your course fun. You can do this by adding in a dose of gamification. This will make the course more enjoyable for the students and they will be more likely to stay engaged.
Apart from the standard gamification methods of badges, points, leaderboards etc., there are many fun and interactive methods you can use to make your course more appealing to your students.
Debates: These are a great way to get students to debate issues. You can either use existing debates or create your own.
Quizzes: These are a great way to measure the progress your students are making. You can use them to check understanding or at certain points in the course for fun.
Project Teams: Set up teams for students to work on projects together. This will give them the chance to learn from each other and build relationships with their classmates.
Recognition: It is important to reward good work, recognise the best students and allow them to showcase their work.
Competition: Create competitions for fun, students can compete against each other or against the clock.
In summary: The right flipped classroom platform will help you with all elements required to take your online course to the next level.
It will allow for pre-recorded videos, live community discussions and gamification elements.
Unsolved is a Flipped Classroom Platform that was built to help you take your online course to the next level. And it's 100% Free to launch, for unlimited students