After spending nearly a year recording video lectures for my flipped classes, I have finally arrived at a semester in which MOST of the lectures have been recorded (for better or worse) and I am able to focus my time on improving the quality of the ACTIVITIES we do during class time. Although I am painfully critical of the quality of my existing video lectures, I am grateful to finally have more time to work on the class activities.
I am always intrigued by case studies and if you haven’t taken a look at the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science, you really need to check it out. This resource is included in the APS Archive and it is literally a gold mine of interesting cases. I’ve signed up for their email listserv and receive monthly updates describing new cases they’ve recently posted. When I get these emails, I usually end up wishing I taught more classes, because the topics are so engaging. I was particularly interested in checking out a relatively recent case about Colony Collapse Disorder in honeybees.
The group also facilitates an annual summer workshop where participants explore different kinds of case studies, and then write and deliver their own cases to a guinea pig group of undergrads who offer feedback on the experience. Someday, when I figure out how to squeeze 48 hours out of each 24, I would LOVE to participate in this conference. But there are other sources of case studies for use in the flipped classroom. One of my favorite workshops at the HAPS Annual Conference last year in Las Vegas was Cherie McKeever’s workshop on writing your own case studies. She also offers an online summer class on how to write and implement fun cases.
I am going to experiment with a clicker-based case study on hearing loss this week in Human Physiology. I will keep you posted!
