The Making of ACAS 2: Inverted Classrooms

Of late Al Shifa College of Arts & Science (ACAS) has become often connected to the blended teaching strategy known as Flipped Learning. This is because three months into the launch of the new college under my leadership, we decided to embrace a blended mode of content delivery. There were a number of reasons which drove us to this decision. The college was launched in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic in the month of September in 2020. Though a good part of the lessons were provided during the period in the online mode, there were spells of offline presences too. A mode of content delivery which is ideal for the period was a blended one and flipped model is what we went for. 

The Beginnings:

What was prompted to a good extent by the compulsions of the pandemic period was later upgraded to a core practice of ACAS. This was not a decision taken in a hurry or done foreseeing a prolonged persistence of the pandemic situation. The series of discussions I had with the Department Heads and IQAC members, coupled with the long felt need to break away from the stronghold of lecture-centeredness, resulted in the pro-flipped learning decision. What followed was the initial phase of educating the faculty members on the Flipped way of learning. The Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC), organised a national level online master class on Flipped Classrooms in October 2020 and it was widely attended and well recieved. That masterclass was an exercise in building awareness about and popularizing the flipped mode. 

At the College level, expository awareness was provided to the faculty leadership and the faculty members on the one side and the student and parent community, on the other. Faculty needed time to be onboarded to this new mode and it did raise challenges. Predictably the most powerful roadblock was the presence of lecture as the default mode set by the faculty members. The pull of the lecture-comfort was so strong that it took some effort, persuasion and compulsion too, at the end, to push flipped mode to the top of the agenda. Once the faculty members were taken into confidence (though this was neither easy nor that quick!), we moved to the period of training in a phased manner. In fact it was a mixture of practice and training at the start.

Flipping Learning: 

Flipped learning is a mode of teaching in which content is shared with the learners in advance through videos, audios or at times even in the form of a text. This happens before the students attend the sessions physically. They are expected to arrive for the face to face sessions after having listened to the content already shared. What follows in the classrooms is discussions and applied learning tasks which trigger higher order thinking skills. As it is a method which allows the exploitation of the possibilities offered by technology and promotes a number of skill sets, it sure needs to be supported. 

Challenges: 

One issue at the start was related to the recording of sessions by the faculty members. Lack of practice, self consciousness, tendency to compare with other available resources on the web, difficulties related to voice modulation, eye contact, self doubts as to the quality of content- all these were part of issues to be confronted. But this was not peculiar to Flipped learning as even those who only used recorded sessions during the pandemic had to record and share faced the same problem. practice helped the faculty  overcome these and they were ready for the adventure. 

Other hurdle on the switch to flipped learning at the College was related to the designing of tasks/ activities which are to be integrated to the classroom interaction. Since the college teachers are basically an untrained lot, without any teaching specific training unlike the school teachers, this was a significant hurdle. Through constant follow ups and training, not to mention the periodic mentoring meeting offered, the college has s addressed this problem, though this will remain an area where the spotlight should fall. The workshop on Gamification of Classrooms which we organised was one among the many such follow up training sessions. Another area of concern was the initial reluctance of the student community to buy into the new mode. They feel that the flipped mode is putting more workload on their shoulders, making life easy for the faculty members! Their reluctance to watch/listen to the content before they arrive for face to face sessions was yet another difficulty we encountered at the beginning of each new batch. 

Initially the project was monitored by the Principal and in the second stage Dept. Heads, who by then have grown in capability, were assigned the coordinatorship. An overall college level coordinator too was found. From dept.-wise file follow up, we later switched to faculty-wise documentation. Best Flipper of the month award for faculty was introduced last year and Flipper of the year faculty award followed suit. Ms. Radhika, Asst. Professor of English, walked away with the honour this academic year, offering maximum number of flipped sessions. 

Though there's still a long way to go, the college has accepted the flipped mode of learning as one of its best practices and the faculty and student community have begun to realise the advantages. Lead Faculty members are now offering sessions to colleges around in the flipped mode and we have also established Institute for Flipped Learning to popularise it. With the introduction of the FYUGP against the backdrop of the New Educational Policy (NEP 2020), increasing significance is placed on blended modes of content transaction in the higher education institutions and we are happy that ACAS has been the front runner of a mode which is now being recommended. 

Takeaways: 

The flipped mode offers many advantages: Faculty upskilling, technology integration, setting apart bulk of the classroom presence for interactions and discussion, use of applied learning strategies, room for student activities and the increased possibility of engagement, the multiple use of recorded content and the like. Cutting down on lecture is certainly another major positive. 

The way forward: 

The college needs to carry on with the support and mentoring and slowly expand the core team of lead faculties who have already adopted flipped learning as their key mode of delivery of course content. Continuous support needs to be provided to the rest. The student community is to be made aware of the benefits of the mode, using the alumni who can interact with the students. The alumni will be capable of assessing the adva tages as they have left the campus and might be begging to assess the true takeaways Lecture, what  Brian Rosenberg  calls, (in 'Whatever it is, I'm against it'),  "the style of teaching that has ruled the universities for 600 years," is still, lurking in the backdrop to take over. (Scott Freeman, a biologist at the University of Washington, traces the history of the lecture even back to 1050, when universities were founded in Western Europe and when barbers were just starting to perform surgery, Brian states). The question is, will the best 'practice' of flipping sessions be sustained through internalisation by the faculty so passionately that it will assume the default position? I hope it will, for many of them, at ACAS. 

Babu. P. K., Ph D.