Experiences of the Flipped Classroom method Does it make students more motivated?

The aim of this paper is to highlight use of the flipped classroom method, and how teachers perceive this teaching practice. More specific the research focus on whether the teachers’ experience that the model leads to increased motivation in the students learning process. The background for the research is generated from qualitative interviews with teachers, and the empirical data obtained is from semi-structured interviews with these informants. The results show that the flipped classroom method in fact did increase participation and cooperation, which in turn generated motivation and willing students. The teachers got more time for guidance of each student, which provided more solid knowledge on each student’s academic level

Protocol: the effects of flipped classrooms to improve learning outcomes in undergraduate health professional education: a systematic review

[Extract] The teaching and learning activities of any undergraduate curriculum will have a specific set of learning outcomes that should be successfully achieved by the students. The balance between the workload of a student and the available time to achieve the learning outcomes plays a major role in achieving these learning outcomes, as well as a good student satisfaction score and excellent final grades for that particular module (Whillier & Lystad, 2013). In a traditional educational experience, a teacher stands in front of the classroom, delivers a lecture to a group of students, who sit in rows, quietly listening to the lecture and taking notes. At the end of the lecture, students are given homework or an assignment to be completed outside of the classroom environment. This characterises the principle of “sage‐on‐the stage”, and is synonymous with the present day term of teacher‐centered learning. This is also referred to as the transmittal model (King, 1993), which assumes that the students are passive note‐takers, receivers of the content or accumulators of factoids (Morrison, 2014). Usually, the teacher does not have time to interact with the students individually during the class (Hamdan, McKnight, McKnight & Arfstorm, 2013), thus neglecting those students who do not understand the lecture. The traditional didactic way of teaching is primarily unidirectional and consists of limited interactions between the source of knowledge (teacher) and the passive recipients (students)

Designing citizen science tools for learning: lessons learnt from the iterative development of nQuire

This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed ‘citizen inquiry’, which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, ‘citizen inquiry’, by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time

Mapping ice cliffs on debris-covered glaciers using multispectral satellite images

Ice cliffs play a key role in the mass balance of debris-covered glaciers, but assessing their importance is limited by a lack of datasets on their distribution and evolution at scales larger than an individual glacier. These datasets are often derived using operator-biased and time-consuming manual delineation approaches, despite the recent emergence of semi-automatic mapping methods. These methods have used elevation or multispectral data, but the varying slope and mixed spectral signal of these dynamic features makes the transferability of these approaches particularly challenging. We develop three semi-automated and objective new approaches, based on the Spectral Curvature and Linear Spectral Unmixing of multispectral images, to map these features at a glacier to regional scale. The transferability of each method is assessed by applying it to three sites in the Himalaya, where debris-covered glaciers are widespread, with varying lithologic, glaciological and climatic settings, and encompassing different periods of the melt season. We develop the new methods keeping in mind the wide range of remote sensing platforms currently in use, and focus in particular on two products: we apply the three approaches at each site to near-contemporaneous atmospherically-corrected Pléiades (2 m resolution) and Sentinel-2 (10 m resolution) images and assess the effects of spatial and spectral resolution on the results. We find that the Spectral Curvature method works best for the high spatial resolution, four band Pléaides images, while a modification of the Linear Spectral Unmixing using the scaling factor of the unmixing is best for the coarser spatial resolution, but additional spectral information of Sentinel-2 products. In both cases ice cliffs are mapped with a Dice coefficient higher than 0.48. Comparison of the Pléiades results with other existing methods shows that the Spectral Curvature approach performs better and is more robust than any other existing automated or semi-automated approaches. Both methods outline a high number of small, sometimes shallow-sloping and thinly debris-covered ice patches that differ from our traditional understanding of cliffs but may have non-negligible impact on the mass balance of debris-covered glaciers. Overall these results pave the way for large scale efforts of ice cliff mapping that can enable inclusion of these features in debris-covered glacier melt models, as well as allow the generation of multiple datasets to study processes of cliff formation, evolution and decline

Sperm motility and fertilisation success in an acidified and hypoxic environment

The distribution and function of many marine species is largely determined by the effect of abiotic drivers on their reproduction and early development, including those drivers associated with elevated CO2 and global climate change. A number of studies have therefore investigated the effects of elevated pCO2 on a range of reproductive parameters, including sperm motility and fertilisation success. To date, most of these studies have not examined the possible synergistic effects of other abiotic drivers, such as the increased frequency of hypoxic events that are also associated with climate change. The present study is therefore novel in assessing the impact that a hypoxic event could have on reproduction in a future high CO2 ocean. Specifically, this study assesses sperm motility and fertilisation success in the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus exposed to elevated pCO2 for 6 months. Gametes extracted from these pre acclimated individuals were subjected to hypoxic conditions simulating an hypoxic event in a future high CO2 ocean. Sperm swimming speed increased under elevated pCO2 and decrease under hypoxic conditions resulting in the elevated pCO2 and hypoxic treatment being approximately equivalent to the control. There was also a combined negative effect of increased pCO2 and hypoxia on the percentage of motile sperm. There was a significant negative effect of elevated pCO2 on fertilisation success, and when combined with a simulated hypoxic event there was an even greater effect. This could potentially affect cohort recruitment and in turn reduce the density of this ecologically and economically important ecosystem engineer therefore potentially effecting biodiversity and ecosystem services

Physiological Costs of Repetitive Courtship Displays in Cockroaches Handicap Locomotor Performance

Courtship displays are typically thought to have evolved via female choice, whereby females select mates based on the characteristics of a display that is expected to honestly reflect some aspect of the male’s quality. Honesty is typically enforced by mechanistic costs and constraints that limit the level at which a display can be performed. It is becoming increasingly apparent that these costs may be energetic costs involved in the production of dynamic, often repetitive displays. A female attending to such a display may thus be assessing the physical fitness of a male as an index of his quality. Such assessment would provide information on his current physical quality as well as his ability to carry out other demanding activities, qualities with which a choosy female should want to provision her offspring. In the current study we use courtship interactions in the Cuban burrowing cockroach, Byrsotria fumigata to directly test whether courtship is associated with a signaler’s performance capacity. Males that had produced courtship displays achieved significantly lower speeds and distances in locomotor trials than non-courting control males. We also found that females mated more readily with males that produced a more vigorous display. Thus, males of this species have developed a strategy where they produce a demanding courtship display, while females choose males based on their ability to produce this display. Courtship displays in many taxa often involve dynamic repetitive actions and as such, signals of stamina in courtship may be more widespread than previously thought