The scene: A professor sits at a desk in front of a laptop, wearing headphones. A high-tech microphone sits on the desk to the left of the laptop. The laptop screen shows the time of an audio file: 18 minutes and 35 seconds.
When I began teaching Hebrew online, one of my first questions concerned how long I should make my recorded lectures. My classes did not meet live, so there would not be time for announcements, questions in class, exercises done together, etc. I realized that all of these things together made up the time that would have been spent in class. Instead, lectures would be recorded. Announcements would be posted online. Questions would be posted in the discussion area; and exercises would be worked online and through homework. Students would spend the bulk of their time in parallel self-study.
Norman Eng suggests spending 25 per cent of classtime on lecture and 50 per cent on activities. (P. 139) I have taught for several years now, and this idea still seems revolutionary. My own memory is of sitting in classes with long lectures while I took notes furiously about verb paradigms while the professor wrote them on the board. I hope that I remember incorrectly.
Advice given to me at the time of my entry into teaching was that students should spend two hours of study outside the classroom for each hour they spent in class. Using this formula, my Hebrew students should devote six to eight hours a week to my class alone.
The formula gave me great anxiety as a professor. My course was not designed like a class where students met for three hours a week, listened to me lecture for a while, did some exercises on the board, and had a quiz at the end of the week. Instead, there were lectures to download and exercises to work online. There were no partners to work with unless one arranged to work together with a classmate whom one had never met.
I put myself in the place of a student. I thought about what I was doing in life while trying to fit in time for the online course. Structuring my time was a lot harder than having the university structure it for me. Norman Eng says, “Real students are working, caring for siblings, and taking five other courses—all of which also require their undivided attention. You can’t expect them to be mentally present all the time.” Seminary students were often serving as pastors or ministry interns while doing the above things.
If they took a full-time course load in which they were expected to spend three additional hours of study per credit hour, they would spend close to 40 hours a week in study alone. The students needed time to breathe. The demand on them was unmanageable.
William Bowen emphasizes that “flipping the classroom” can be valuable in terms of learning but not necessarily less costly. It is only less costly if it results in better quality time spent in hands-on activity. (pp. 64-65)
I could not change my homework requirements much; but I could shorten my lectures. I cut out redundant topics, and I explained clearly what the activities were for the week.
I wanted students to be aware that the short lectures were meant to be respectful of their time. At the end of the lectures, i invited them to post questions in the discussion forum or contact me if they needed assistance. During times when I posted lectures late due to illness, I made special effort to post a brief audio check-in so that students could hear that I was not well and so that they understood that I was still available via text.
Spending less time on lectures allowed me more time to connect with students and provide better responses to individual difficulties on assignments, questions, and difficulties in coping with the online course environment. In the long run, these things positively affected student retention in my courses.
Today some of my courses include live sessions in which I focus the time on students’ questions, sample exercises, and provide live feedback regarding homework. The flipped classroom arrangement has been positively received by all students. Occasionally a student arrives feeling exceedingly stressed by life circumstances, and we use some class time to engage in light conversation before diving into language study.
Each semester that I teach and observe students taking more control of their learning process, I become more convinced that shorter, pre-recorded lectures are better.
Sources
Bowen, William G. 2013. Higher Education in the Digital Age. Ithaca, NY: Princeton Universiyt.
Eng, Norman. 2015. Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students. Crown.
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