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Academic publishing house John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has teamed up with TED to produce instructor material for a recently launched series of videos called the "TED Studies." The link takes you to a press announcement from Wiley, in which there is a link to the first two inaugural courses. One of these is in psychology, the other is in statistics. The instructor material is online in these first two cases, but I cannot see where Wiley precludes potential print material in the future. I also cannot find the TED Studies area of the TED web pages, and I am trying to discover the difference between TED Studies and the previously announced TED-Ed initiative. I will update this comment when I can find more information.

Essay by a professor at Vanderbilt who adapted his face-to-face classes to take advantage of MOOCs on the same subject. He calls this making his course a "wrapper", I've called it "using the MOOC as a textbook." See in particular the last paragraph, regarding the "scholarly-like community with my fellow educators."

Admittedly this example covers engineering students and is limited to just two semesters worth of data from a large, public, research university. However, the results are encouraging if you ever wondered whether or not students might actually watch the screencast videos you are making (or plan on making).

An interesting idea about the flipped classroom model. The professors in the article are not only challenging the idea of class time and homework time, but the idea that the whole class needs to move through the same syllabus at the same pace. From the article: "We would rather our kids actually know 80 percent of the content, instead of being exposed to 100 percent of the content," said Bergmann.

"A microlecture is a short recorded audio or video presentation on a single, tightly defined topic." ELI wraps up some of the important points to when considering this approach to a "blended" or "flipped" classroom.

There's a fair amount of interest at Kenyon in moving lecture out of class time. This article addresses the fine points of what you do, then, with the freed-up class time. Includes a bibliography for further reading.

Three good suggestions for classroom activities which get groups of students interacting deeply with course content. Notice how these would work whether your "flipped" classroom relies on videos or more traditional out-of-class reading.

Patrick Jackson uses a "flipped classroom" model to force himself to not lecture, and instead focus intro-level students on the core skills of historical analysis. From the GLCA Center for Teaching and Learning.

I've heard (and said) that small humanities classes already are "flipped", but Derek Bruff gives some examples which show that a lit class can still be flipped. Even close reading and response writing "can benefit from what Helen Shin calls "shared temporal, spatial, and cognitive presence.""

This testimonial brings up a crucial aspect of course design--making sure that you have reasonable expectations for your own workload when developing activities that require significant amounts of direction and feedback from the instructor.

Check out this sample flipped lesson that I created in just a few minutes on the TED-Ed (or is it EdTED) site. Currently TED-Ed has only a limited number of videos, but perhaps all TED lectures will be available for flipped lessons in the future. Interested in seeing what you can do yourself? Then go to http://ed.ted.com/ and click on the tour (or Learn More) links. Next, create your own account and get started. This speaker brings together the fields of mathematics, marine biology, feminine handicrafts, and environmental activism. Seriously!

This podcast about under-prepared students touches on the reasons we see more of them in higher education nationally, and various teaching techniques which can help students succeed.

Covers the adoption of clickers for instant feedback in a broad range of venues, including such diverse places as fire departments, churches, cruise ships and schools. 

Analysis of discussions on a site called Piazza suggest that requiring students to post an introduction can improve the amount of discussion on the boards, while heavily-graded discussions can lead students to "grind for grades" instead of authentically participate.

Show me the data! Frankly, I think any survey that includes 722 physics faculty members has to be worthwhile -- that is quite the sample size! Moreover, this is likely to be pretty representative. While it is impressive that a very large majority (88%) were aware of certain "research-based instructional strategies," what is even more impressive is that 82% of the respondents had tried some of these strategies. True, 1/3 of these have given up and gone back to traditional lectures, but I agree with Eric Mazur's comment that this means that 2/3 are still plugging away. The follow-up studies should be interesting, especially if they shed light on what drove the 1/3 who gave up to do so.

Flipping the classroom is about more than students watching videos outside of class. It is about taking advantage newly available classroom time to lead students in active and engaging activities for improved learning outcomes. Developing new and effective activities can be a challenge and differs by discipline. This useful article discusses a range of practices at various universities and the offers thoughtful quotes from faculty about the pros and cons of those activities.

A well-done overview of screencasting that covers the pedagogical benefits of screencasts, strategies for using them effectively, a review of tools and techniques for producing them and useful links for further reading.