The Future of Education

Teaching entails a constant search for the one correct way of instruction. When organising courses, it is natural to ask what teaching method is most suitable. Answers have recently been sought to this question in the course Spoken and Written Icelandic which more than one hundred on-site and distance students attend in the Teacher Education Department of the School of Education at the University of Iceland. Various methods have been tried: co-teaching of on-site and distance students, peer evaluation groups composed randomly of on-site and distance students, among other methods.

In the 2013 fall semester, yet another experiment was made in the course Spoken and Written Icelandic, and this time, flipped teaching was used. This is a method that many teachers are currently focusing on. Instructors in primary and upper secondary schools have experimented with flipped teaching, and the most reputable universities in the world now also offer such instruction, for example, Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley.

Flipped teaching consists in turning teaching methods upside down. The actual knowledge acquisition of students takes place by their computer at home, using recordings that have been posted online. Students sit by their computer and watch and listen to recordings from their teacher, or others, as often as suits them. When students attend class, the actual processing of the acquired knowledge takes place.

The course Spoken and Written Icelandic was organised according to the method of flipped teaching. Short recordings were uploaded (Moodle) and group sessions were then organised where the material covered in the recordings was worked with. Students had a choice of attending workshops either in the classroom or online. In this regard, it did not matter whether students had registered as on-site students or distance students.

An introduction will be given of the results of flipped teaching, focusing on students’ use of the online lectures and their activity in the workshops. The question of whether this teaching method was successful will be answered, taking into consideration, for example, the results from a teaching evaluation.