Veronica Weber
Cover Story
Stanford University junior Perth Charernwattanagul watches an online lecture. Charernwattanagul, who took a “flipped” class on databases last fall, said the ability to watch lecture content in advance of class, often more than once, improved his mastery of the material.
Flipping the university
classroom Stanford tests the power of stories and technology to boost learning by Chris Kenrick
D
espite an explosion in biomedical knowledge, the method of teaching first-year medical students through lectures has changed little since the Wright brothers were tinkering at Kitty Hawk over a century ago, says Stanford University pediatric infectious disease specialist Charles Prober. Prober, who also is associate dean for medical education at the School of Medicine, aims to improve on that. By making lessons “stickier” — more memorable and comprehensible — and embracing self-paced and mastery-based approaches, he hopes to make better use of students’ time in their task of absorbing the everexpanding medical canon. Ultimately, he aspires to make better doctors. Prober’s emerging reform efforts at
the School of Medicine, combining face-to-face and online teaching, are part of a larger and systematic initiative across Stanford to test the uses of technology in search of better ways to teach and learn. The global onslaught of education technology — described variously as a “tsunami” and an “avalanche” — has colleges and universities around the world scrambling to position for a future that is sure to be different. Online learning — including the newly famous “MOOCs” (massive, open online courses, in which tens of thousands of students around the world have enrolled in some Stanfordtaught courses) — promises to remake 21st-century higher education in ways nobody can predict. Stanford aims to blaze a trail and remain standing in that brave new world, leveraging its entrepreneurial culture, star-studded faculty, depth in computer science and broad resources to test online approaches to figure out what actually works. Last year, about 60 professors
across the university experimented with new, technology-assisted teaching methods — probably the highest level of participation on any university campus, computer science professor John Mitchell said. Chief among the new approaches is the so-called “flipped classroom,” in which faculty members convert lectures into online video modules to be absorbed by students before they come to class. Class time then becomes available to build on the academic content with interactive discussion, hands-on activities or guest speakers. Stanford President John Hennessy last summer created a new ViceProvost’s Office for Online Learning, appointing Mitchell to head it. In turn, the schools of business, engineering and medicine appointed deans to lead their respective onlinelearning efforts. “It really hasn’t been my job to get people interested in it,” Mitchell said. (continued on next page)
By the numbers Jennifer Widom’s Introduction to Databases course, fall 2012
Veronica Weber
Stanford Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Ethics David Magnus, far right, speaks with first-year medical students in one of the school’s larger lecture halls for a session on Ethics: Adolescent Confidentiality and Decision-Making.
48,000 21,000 4,900 1,900 240
students who enrolled online who submitted one or more assignments who completed the entire course who completed the course “with distinction” Stanford University students who enrolled in the on-campus class
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