Offload Content to Increase Instruction Time

Who is doing all of the work in your classes? Are you doing the heavy lifting, or are your students? If our students are watching us do all of the work, we are making things harder on ourselves and creating passive learners in our students.

Unfortunately, we never have enough time to teach everything our students need to know and have them do the work to apply and retain what we teach. One solution is to think about implementing the Flipped Classroom Model.

The idea behind a flipped classroom is that students do not need to come to class to be talked at (they do not need us to deliver information they can watch in a video online). The value of coming to class is to learn from us what they cannot learn on their own. As instructors, our value (and the value of coming to class) goes far beyond the content we can deliver. Our value comes from all the other amazing things we do in the classroom (e.g., provide experiences, elaborate on content, give examples, mentor, guide, facilitate, etc.).

Steps for offloading content:

1. Review your course content/notes/lectures and decide which aspects could be covered outside of class (i.e., primarily content delivery).
   1. Find resources online or create resources that deliver that content. You do not have to create everything yourself. There are many great resources available.
      • Harvard Project Zero (http://www.pz.harvard.edu/professional-development/online-courses)
      • YouTube
      • LinkedIn Learning (free for many institutions)
      • Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/)
      • Merlot (www.merlot.org)
   2. Restructure your syllabus so students consume the content before class, and the class days focus on working with the content.
   3. Create ways to hold students accountable for doing out-of-class work.
   4. Think about how you want to structure your class time now that you will not spend as much time delivering content.
      • Guided Discussion
      • Active Learning Techniques
      • Group work
      • In class assignments
      • Reflection
   5. Start small. Do not feel like you need to transform your class format completely. Instead, pick one or two lessons you could flip and see what happens.