Full story at the UBC CTLT website.

EXCERPT: Ranjit Dhari and Joanne Ricci are the instructors for NURS 336: Professional Nursing Practice with Communities and Populations. They transformed their six-week course by using the flipped classroom approach.

In NURS 336, Ranjit and Joanne invite a number of guest speakers, who work in the profession, to share their expertise with the students. This provides a key link between the theory and clinical practice. However, Ranjit and Joanne have faced a number of challenges with bringing in guest speakers. “These experts are hard to get on a consistent basis,” explains Joanne. “When we would phone our partners in the community to be a guest speaker, they could help out maybe one or two times per year.” Unfortunately, this means that the same guest speakers are not available for each course offering. This adds some content variability across each six-week course.

Another challenge has been to make the content of the guest speakers available to all students. One solution has been to video tape the experts. “We decided to do a video. To video tape our guest speakers,” notes Ranjit. The guest speakers were videotaped in the Applied Science studio space, and Learning Technology Rovers helped edit the videos. The final videos were then uploaded to the Connect course site for all students to view.

After consulting the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) about the instructional design of the course, Ranjit and Joanne decided to shorten the length of the guest speaker videos. Ranjit notes that they were advised that students would not watch such a long video. “We looked at converting the one hour talking head and chunked it up,” she says. Ranjit and Joanne worked with the Learning Technology Rovers to edit the videos into shorter, more digestible segments, and organized the videos into the relevant population-based sections of the course.

At the end of each video, Ranjit and Joanne included embedded questions and recommendations. “We embed questions in their learning…so they can use this knowledge in the arena of public health,” says Joanne. “We looked at how can we make it interactive,” adds Ranjit.

Both Ranjit and Joanne acknowledged that the rapid pace of the course can lead to faculty burnout. “It is exhausting to do it every six weeks,” states Joanne. By having a break with the flipped classroom sessions, faculty are able to spend more time developing the course.

Joanne has also found it advantageous to move some of the in-class lecture time online, so that students can view the information at a time that is convenient for them. “It has been helpful to give them that flexibility,” she states.

Ranjit has noticed that students are making good use of the time that was normally dedicated to face-to-face lectures. She has found that students use the time to email her questions or book office hour appointments. Ranjit has also found that fewer students are needing extra time for their assignments. “I’ve gotten less requests for extensions,” she says.