In the flipped model of blended learning, students watch online lectures and then complete assignments to which teachers respond directly, sometimes in a classroom setting and sometimes, as in this Stanford version, entirely online. One student’s critique of Stanford University’s public experiment in flipped instruction receives a measured response in Marc Perry’s recent article in “Wired Campus.”

by Marc Perry / Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus blog / 5 January 2012

Stanford University got lots of attention for inviting the public to participate in a series of free online computer-science classes. One thing that’s drawn less notice is how some of the technologies that help facilitate those mega-classes are changing the experience for Stanford students learning the same subjects. Now a Stanford student is provoking a debate on those innovations, with a blog postcritiquing the rigor and format of the “flipped classroom” teaching method deployed in his machine-learning course.

In one version of that course offered to Stanford students, the traditional teaching format was inverted, with lectures presented through online videos and optional once-a-week class meetings devoted to problem solving with the professor. The videos, plus auto-graded assignments, were also offered to the public in the free online version of the machine-learning class. As of November, a staggering 94,000 people had signed up to take that course.

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