We tried to run one session completely online – the flipped classrom – with an intention to have a 10-15 minute revisit summary on the day, going over the participants comments, discussing what needs revisiting, underlining what seems essential and so on. Once more, we found that not enough participants completed the activity to make this effective. Only 9 people went in and did the work – and 2 more the morning of the session, too late to be of a lot of use. We have had to revisit the session quickly, adding 10-15 more minutes to do the homework collectively in session. It worked our more or less but not as well as we initially planned.
After the day we came up with this idea: from now on we will time the online lesson completions. As in: the participants will receive the link to the website on, for ex, Monday. They will be told they must complete the 1st day’s task in 2 or 3 days. If a participant does not do so he/she will be contacted personally to remind him/her of the tasks. The same strategy will be used again for the 2nd and 3rd day tasks too. Hard deadlines for the online tasks and further reminders in case of non-compliance seem to be essential to the lesson plans that use flexible learning. There are ways to make sure the flexible learning site is fully incorporated to our sessions but we must ensure the site is used and currently this seems to be our best idea to that end.