Teachers lecturing their students is old-school. But what’s the alternative? Well, at least in theory it’s easy to come up with a contemporary alternative: Rather than teaching knowledge, the teacher becomes an instructor who facilitates and sustains the student’s learning. No more teaching from here on it’s just learning. This blog is about my personal take on how to implement this in practice. A glimpse into what it implies to attend my class.

Earning your banners - let’s do the math

In the context of The European Credit Transfer System¹ (ECTS) points are measured relative to time spent by the student. In Denmark one point equals ≈28 hours.

When measuring ECTS as time spent it includes everything relevant to the programme. Examples could be:

Spending time in class with the instructor
Reading texts
Listening to podcasts
Watching video tutorials or recorded lectures
Meetings - both AFK or online
Writing personal notes, reports, documentation, code, messages in chats, posts in discussion forums, emails.
Discussing with peers, tutors and instructors
Team work
Planning
Practicing
Preparing for exam
Attending exam

A semester is 30 ECTS points, so to receive flying colors you are expected to spend no less than ≈840 hours (≈28x30) per semester - A semester is 20 weeks, so that divides to ≈42 hours per week (≈840/20)

≈42 hours per week - that’s a (busy) full-time job!

Do you have a student job? Let’s imaging a person who has a 12 hour/week job on the side while attending a higher education. That person is either in for a total work week of 54 hours - or taking the education more lightly than expected.

Now, looking briefly at how the instructors spend their time during a semester, it’s a very similar type of calculation, which I won’t go into details with just point out that it obviously includes:

Spending time in class with the students
…

It shall come as no surprise, that both students and instructors have an activity in which they are in contact with each others - often refereed to as contact time.

Students get ≈4 weeks of the semester to prepare and execute exam. The active part of the semester is then about 16 weeks. Finalizing the math we can calculate the expected contact-time-to-other-time ratio for students, during the active part of the semester. It is roughly 1:2.

For each hour spent in contact with the instructor - it’s expected that you spend additional two hours on other stuff

At KEA the typical classroom sessions are 2x90mins = 3 hours. So every time you have a session in class - you ere expected to spend additional 6 hours on preparing, practicing, noting, writing, discussing etc.

No more calculations - I promise. But I just wanted to share - or remind - these numbers to you to give you an insight into how I plan my instruction sessions.

Flipped classroom

In a traditional old-school approach, teachers would lecture students. As a student you would be expected to spend the time in class, sitting on your butt and passively receive the teacher’s knowledge as it would pour over you. You would then suck it up - like a sponge - and store and memories it in your brains. So I could be queried and extracted during an examination at the end of the semester.

This approach is now considered old-school and it’s not what we (should) practice on KEA.

Since ancient times, universities had monopoly on both producing and distributing knowledge. If you wanted knowledge you would have to sign up to an education and listen to the professors - pouring knowledge over you.

Today’s picture is very different. There is literally no knowledge that I can pour over you in class. That you couldn’t just as easily have sucked up yourself from the internet (or even from printed books which are still frequently used in higher education).

One established and well renowned alternative didactic practice, that is considered novell, is Flipped Classroom. It’s a principle that flips (or shifts left) the traditional divide of what is done where. I’ve setup up the table to try to clarify:

Didactic style	Preparation	In class	Practice
Traditional	Reading (Familiarize yourself with the topic)	Lecture (Be introduced to the topic)	Homework (Explore or practice the topic)
Flipped	Be introduced to the topic (Lecture)	Explore or practice the topic (Homework)	Familiarize yourself with the topic (Reading)

Surely - Flipped Classroom is definitely not a revolution, it’s a small and simple concept: Watch your lectures online, do your homework at school and add to that later - if you care.

A practical example could be that on the topic of “Flipped Classroom” I would point you to some materials - maybe a wikipedia article on the topic, youtube and a time boxed exercise to go and research more videos on your own:

Lets say that the materials that would curate and point out to you would occupy roughly an hour of your time to go through - being introduced to the topic at home. Hereafter you know as much about Flipped Classroom as if I - as a teacher - had poured that same knowledged over you during a lecture. So in a sense you can say that we’ve saved some of my time - roughly an hour. We can now spend that freed-up time in class doing “homework” - together.

And for the sake of avoiding mistakes I will stop calling it “homework” and refer to it as activities.

There are several advantages to this:

You will get your knowledge from multiple sources - not just your teacher.
You might pick up something that even the teacher didn’t know or noticed - the apprentice can exceed the master (have you seen Karate Kid?).
Any questions you may have from the instructions can be noted by you in forehand - maybe even in a source or tool shared with the instructor - who then gets a chance to prepare a good reply.
You will be doing your activities while you are not alone, but while you are together with peers - this forms the foundation for class collaboration.
The planned activities can therefore now include joint activities - since the instructor can count on the fact, that learners aren’t home alone while doing homework.
Even the instructor will be at your side while you do perform these activities - available for guidance, perspective, stories.

So the biggest change does not some from simply doing the same thing a bit differently at different locations. The biggest impact come from redefining our roles.

What does Flipped Classroom impose on my role in class - as an instructor (was teacher) and on your role in class - as a learner (was student)?.

The instructor

Curate and point to (some) material that learners can absorb before class to become introduced to the topic.
Plan the programme, learning goals and activities.
Be available for perspectives, opinions, story telling.
Respond to feed-back and questions.

The learner

Focus on problems or challenges; find, design, discuss, think and solve them.
Seek - the learner will be led rather than fed.
Interact with peers or Community Of Practice first - and instructors later.
Collaborate with peers on joint learning goals.
Explore what it means to lean - and optimize that process.

Collaborate

An important feature we get from the flipped classroom is that we can all collaborate on ensuring the everyone in class reaches the learning goals as a joint effort.

Analogy:

Imagine that the same group of people; learners, instructors - us! - had a different joint task. Imaging that we were given the task to build a piece of software - a complex distributed system with backend supporting programmable immutable infrastructure and frontend with delicious graphical design in multiple views accessible from multiple devices and with customer segmentation, load balancing, continuous delivery, automated functional tests, end-user documentation. The Whole Shebang.

It sounds like a daunting task, but it also sounds like a task that you will probably actually find yourself in - in a not so far future. Maybe you imagine, that this is similar to what it will be like being employed as a software developer in a company only a few years from now.

But let’s twist that picture a bit - and instead of imagining that we were in a company developing this complex system as a proprietary product - Imagine that we were an Open Source Community doing it together - in public.

Open Source is good not merely as opposed to bad, poor or inferior but even as opposed to evil.

Open Source is free not merely in the meaning gratis or costless but also in the meaning liberated and without constraints.

In an Open Source community we would work with a contribute approach to collaboration rather than an assignment or task approach.

Everyone would be free to suggest and work on new features. Everyone would be free to question the current state and to give feed back, log findings or bugs. And everyone would be welcome to pick up anything from the backlog and postulate a task based on that - and then star to work on it. Not because it had the highest priority, but simply because it had the biggest appeal and seemed the most interesting one to work on.

Today there are many tools built, designed and optimized for this specific contribute approach to collaboration - and even companies developing proprietary products transform into these collaboration tool stacks - they want to harvest the benefits too.

In the flipped classroom context - when I instruct on the different topics - I want to utilize the same tools and principles during these topics and joint learning goals as if we were an Open Source Community working on the same joint goal - being that everyone in class shall obtain the same learning goals.

The Tool Stack

Let me introduce the tool-stack - At the core is simply:

GitHub
Google Docs

We may need more tools later, but they would then be specific to the problems or challenges at hand and we will add them ad hoc as we identify a specific need them.

Two considerations arise from introducing this new tool-stack:

What consequences does this new stack imply to the one that’s already officially pointed out by KEA. Most importantly Fronter and Microsoft 365 including Teams, chats, Word, Excell, Sharepoint, Outlook
Should we also use our school accounts when accessing these new tools?

Regarding the first consideration I’ll promise to not require any use of Microsoft 365 in my instructions at all and I’ll also promise to keep Fronter in the loop. So I’ll keep Fronter updated and you can continue to use Fronter as your goto tool when you need to lookup what’s the program for the next classroom session? are there any announcements I need to know of? But on Fronter I’ll only put in a short proxy or placeholder - pointing you to the real action. Which will be a publicly available post - exactly like the one you are reading now - and then we will take it from there.

To the 2^nd consideration: Wether or not you should use you school accounts to access GitHub and Google Docs respectively the answer is “no - setup personal, free accounts and use them”. This can seem like a bit controversial reply in context of school recommendations and GDPR regulations but I assure you that its not. Individuals are not regulated by GDPR - only organizations providing or enforcing utilization of systems on behalf of individuals are required to be GDPR compliant. Therefore, since the tools I include are accessible from personally managed accounts - not regulated by the school and at no cost to you - I am liberated to include them as a prerequisite for attending my sessions.

This setup gives you - as a learner - a huge advantage, since you will always have access to the stuff we create together - even after you have left KEA - regardless if you graduate or drop-out.

You should consider if you want to join with your existing personal accounts - assuming you already have accounts on both Google and Github - or if you should setup new, maybe additional, accounts for these sessions. My recommendation would be to keep it simple and use the ones you have. You are you. There’s no need to impersonate different instances of yourself by having multiple accounts.

Structure

My leaning sessions will all roughly follow the same structure.

The off-set (at least for KEA students) will be an entry in Fronter. It will schedule (typically) 2x90min of classroom time at KEA and it will point to:
A post on docs.kea.dev. It will be a post similar to this post. I will strive to record a reading of the post - and put a link to that in the post itself - so you can choose to either read the post or listen to me reading out aloud.
The post will also list all the additional resources you must absorb prior to meeting up in class for the schedules session.
While absorbing all these resources you are encouraged to practice active reading. Scribble down everything you want to bring into class; notes, drawings, questions, terms and concepts you don’t understand, terms and concepts that inspire you, additional links and resources you investigated, etc. My recommendation is that you make these notes in a format this is prepared for sharing - ideally in MarkDown - store it in either a file, an issue or a post in a discussion on GitHub - or alternatively in a Google Doc.
Each module also has a dedicated companion repository; Open Source and publicly available on Kea-Dev at GitHub it will be clearly mentioned in the post on docs.kea.dev which repo to use for the specific module.
In the companion repository you may find starter code and activity descriptions - if any is used in the session. You can fork or copy the repository obtain your own repo if required.
In the companion repo you will also find that the Discussions tab i available and open for everyone with at GitHub account to join. So if you are brave (I Dare You - Be Brave!) you can make the scribbles that you made during your active readings public in the discussion in the companion repo on GitHub. So ask/clarify/reply to others for the world to see. It’s funny how intimidating it usually is for most developers (at least in the beginning) to share code, thoughts and questions in public when it comes to professional work. And at the same time not having problems with sharing personal stuff on SoMe platforms. But hey - overcoming that barrier is what makes Open Source a success, so be brave.

Portfolio

Over time, as learners and instructors work with these modules and sessions we jointly build up a portfolio of answers to questions, solutions to problems and challenges, and we will gather a pile of fun and meaningful activities relevant to the topic - we will be continuously improving.

This Open Source repository - and potentially your personal copy of fork of it - will become like a portfolio to you. A source that you can always go back to and recall what was learned. And you can even show-case it to others.

Learning goals

Explore and understand the concept of “flipped classroom” through a self-introduction based on absorbing curated content.
Elaborate on the consequences it imposes on roles and responsibilities of both the teacher/instructor and the students/learners.
Explore the benefits as well as the liabilities of a flipped classroom approach.
Get a feel for a contribution centric collaboration platform - as opposed to an assignment or task centric collaboration platform.
Access GitHub with a personal account.
Access Google Doc with a personal account.
Learn the most basic MarkDown features.

Resources

Perform active reading. scribble notes, questions, perspectives, links, references, drawings, models etc.

This post [20:00]
Wikipedia on Flipped Classroom [20:00]
Flipped Classroom Model: Why, How, and Overview [5:00]
Search for more videos on Flipped Classroom [30:00]
Quickly browse the organic (non-sponsored) results from the search. Pick two or three videos with length <10:00 from the search results and watch them (or if they aren’t any good, skip them and forward to another) - make a note of which you watched and rank them by your own preference on wether you would recommend them to others interested in understanding Flipped Classroom (time box this exercise to 30:00 in total).
Discussions
Share your notes, engage in public discussions with fellow learners and instructors. You can take a soft start and read the Q&A session and see if you can ask a question, contribute with a reply to an unanswered one or maybe improve or vote-up some of the answers already given by others.

The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) is an obligatory protocol which all Higher Educations in EU/EØS have committed themselves to be compliant with. In this system students earn ECTS points allowing them to freely exchange merits between relevant programmes all across the region. An ECTS point is essentially a measure of estimated planned time spent by the student. The Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science has interpreted how this system works in Denmark. All Higher Educations must adhere to this Danish interpretation. ↩