by Alex Vipond
“Flipping the classroom” is a teaching technique that is gaining popularity very quickly as a cheap, effective style of education. The idea is that our classrooms will no longer rely on in-class lectures—students will instead watch lecture videos at home, at their own pace and with full ability to rewind if their attention slips or if they don’t understand a concept. Students will then apply what they have learnt at home to exercises done in class.
Studies that quantitatively demonstrate how much more information students retain and master in a flipped classroom are beginning to surface; however, other research suggests that the success or failure of a flipped classroom is heavily dependent upon the quality of the videos or other resources that replace in-class, live lectures.
With that in mind, I’d like to share some of my favorite free online resources, which are helping me close the knowledge gaps between “Alex the full-time student” and “Mr. Alex the social entrepreneur.” This list is by no means exhaustive, and the most salient resources are sometimes the ones that you find on your own, but I hope that my five favorites can jumpstart your independent learning process!
Khan Academy, founded by Sal Khan, earns the #1 spot on this list due to their #YouCanLearnAnything campaign, which is not just an inspiring philosophy but an observation grounded in scientific evidence.
The evidence has shown that brain growth works a lot like muscle growth: when you struggle with a tough concept or problem, your brain expands as if it were a muscle lifting weights. More importantly, what it hasn’t shown is that some people are “smart” and others are “dumb”…those ideas grow excitingly less likely with each new study!
Social entrepreneurs might find particularly good professional value in the Khan Academy courses (free and self-paced) on micro/macroeconomics, probability and statistics, finance and capital markets, and entrepreneurship.
These two websites are relative giants in the arena of free online education, and both seem to be closing in swiftly on a system for issuing respectable pseudo-college credits, if not legitimate college credits.
Anybody interested in social enterprise, development, or public policy would love the edX course “The Challenges of Global Poverty,” taught by MIT professors Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. It shares reading material with NU’s own Development Economics course, and is one of those classes that can change the way you see the world, regardless of what subject you study or what your planned career is.
A related edX course is NU’s “Giving with Purpose,” which contains an invaluable evaluation framework for strategic philanthropy (and also interviews with Warren and Doris Buffett, Ben & Jerry’s Ben and Jerry, and more!).
Those looking to learn how to code might want to check out Coursera’s intro courses for Python, a computer programming language that is very commonly used for analyzing text or big data (e.g. survey data collected during the evaluation of a social enterprise).
Speaking of Professors Duflo and Banerjee, the research database maintained by their organization, The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and its close partner, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), are phenomenal sources for cutting-edge empirical evaluations of different policy programs and development strategies. This database has so much to teach development professionals and development funders alike.
I can’t mention the J-PAL/IPA database without letting you know about Google’s dictionary tool, which is a quick way to look up the definitions of the obscure economic and psychological vocabulary words you’ll likely encounter. I’ve found that looking up a key word in the dictionary can sometimes teach me more than the source article would have!
- Social Media
My Facebook page, previously an enormous time-suck, turned into an educational mecca once I started following the right pages. At this point, I might honestly cite Facebook-shared academic articles, news stories, and videos as the source of most of what I’ve learned in the past year. People work full time through social media to inform you of what’s happening in the world, so it’s a great resource to tap into.
Favorite Facebook pages: J-PAL, IPA, NPR, Stanford Social Innovation Review, SEI, and NASA (honestly, who doesn’t enjoy Facebook updates from outer space?)
During his TED talk, Sal Khan observed, “With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time. I can’t imagine a better use of my time.” Likewise, I can’t imagine a better use of mine right now than taking advantage of the empowerment that online resources can provide.
So here is the challenge for any readers who have been kind enough to get this far (probably just Mom): take one resource from this list or one from your own experience, do something with it, and then tweet @SocEntInstitute what you did and where on the Internet you did it. While you’re at it, use the hashtag #YouCanLearnAnything too!
This will help you get on the independent learning fast track, and, of course, will subversively help me add to my list of resources. Also, as of right now, the success of this impromptu social media campaign is the all-encompassing metric of my self-esteem as a newsletter contributor.
Ready, set, go!
References
How one school turned homework on its head with ‘flipped’ instruction. (n.d.). Retrieved February 16, 2015, from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/what-does-a-flipped-classroom-look-like-2/
Strayer, J. (2007).The effects of the classroom flip on the learning environment: a comparison of learning activity in a traditional classroom and a flip classroom that used an intelligent tutoring system. (Electronic Thesis or Dissertation). Retrieved from https://etd.ohiolink.edu/
Khan, Salman. (2011, March). Salman Khan: Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education?language=en
