Postechian Column: Unfamiliar Flipped Learning
Postechian Column: Unfamiliar Flipped Learning
  • Lee Gyuhyeok (PHYS 14)
  • 승인 2016.06.01 12:29
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In POSTECH, some professors changed the method of lecture to flipped learning after the president of POSTECH recommended this new type of learning. Flipped learning is the method of lecture that a professor offers online lectures and students study them in advance of offline class. In the offline lecture, students discuss the online lectures’ contents or solve problems of the contents. As far as I heard, however, many Postechians do not discuss contents and also do not ask questions from the flipped learning lectures. I think that the reason for this situation is many students are accustomed to obtaining knowledge without doubt and they are reluctant to say something in class. I find the reason for this situation from POSTECH.
  We can easily see a very quiet classroom in Korea. Teachers give lecture and sometimes ask a question about the lecture to students to check whether every student understands it or not. The response, however, is usually silence. Do they really understand the entire lecture or do they have any curiosities? Maybe, they would not. Then, what makes them so quiet in the class? To figure it out, we should consider the style of education in Korea. From middle school to high school, a lecture is focused on injecting the knowledge written on textbook to students. Students do their best to understand and memorize the knowledge for getting a high score on a test. If teacher says that some parts of the text book is not contained in the test, students usually do not study the parts. The easiest way of getting a high score would just memorize all of the knowledge, assuming that all of contents on a book are true that they do not have to waste their time to doubt for it. Therefore, many students become a passive learner that they are accustomed to obtaining knowledge without doubt. They rarely study with a critical and various view points. In addition, by similar reason, they are used to just listen to lecture and keep calm.
  An expert said that flipped learning method could realize ‘intrinsic lecture’ that promotes higher-level thinking and ‘active learning’ that students make a profound study from teacher’s lecture and discuss it with other students. Considering these strong points of flipped learning, we should be familiar with and enthusiastically participate in flipped learning.