The Flipped Classroom is an instructional strategy that is receiving considerable attention. A flipped classroom dedicates more class time to hands-on learning, replacing lectures with supplemental materials, such as screencasts and videos, that students can view outside of class.

Thoughtful observers note that the effectiveness of this approach depends on the skill and pedagogical strategies you use. You can't magically transform an ineffective lecture by transferring it to video. Teachers are implementing flipped classrooms in a variety of ways, and some methods are more effective than others are.

Educational leaders such as Stanford, MIT, and Harvard are now experimenting with variants of the flipped classroom. The crucial question is: How can we use this instructional paradigm to best effect?

ISTE book authors Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, two high school science teachers who pioneered the concept, are quick to note that their use of the method is still evolving. They observed that students who stalled on chemistry problems at home were not able to complete subsequent problems until they received help at school the next day. So Bergmann and Sams created more time for students to work on problems during class by transferring their lectures to video.

A glimpse of the videos shows, however, that these teachers are taking full advantage of the medium to create instruction that goes far beyond chalk and a blackboard. One clip shows them flying down a mountain on bikes to illustrate the effects of altitude and atmospheric pressure on a balloon. In another clip, a graph illustrates the effect of a chemical reaction.

By working together, the two teachers had more time to create innovative instructional materials that they could use in both of their classes. ISTE has just published their book, Flip Your Classroom, which describes their approach, and additional information is available on their website, http://flippedlearning.org.

Daphne Koller, a Stanford professor experimenting with the flipped classroom, developed an online platform called Coursera in partnership with another Stanford professor. Coursera embeds short quizzes in videos to test student understanding before continuing to the next segment. She found that classroom attendance doubled when she used class time for group problem-solving sessions instead of lectures. As an added bonus, the interactive video materials created for Coursera are freely available to anyone at www.coursera.com.

Most teachers are familiar with TED talks, short videos presented by leaders in the fields of technology, entertainment, and design (TED). Inspired by innovation centered on flipped classrooms, TED's educational division, TEDEd, developed tools to support this instructional method. The TED-Ed flipped classroom tools (available at http://ed.ted.com) allow teachers to create customized lessons using online videos. The tools allow teachers to add context, questions, and supplementary materials for use with either their own videos or video available on sites such as YouTube. Classroom management tools allow a teacher to see which students have viewed a video and each student's success in answering related questions.

The phrase flipped classroom has encouraged dissemination of the concept because it is short and memorable. However, it also has resulted in some misconceptions about the method. The term flip implies an all-or-nothing reversal, but that is not the case for the flipped classroom. A central goal is to provide more time for interactions with students in class. Teachers can do this in a variety of ways and with different degrees of adoption, ranging from just a few class sessions a year to a complete re-conceptualization of a course. The way a flipped classroom may be most effective depends on the context of a class, so there is not a single flipped classroom method. Use and adoption depends on the instructor.

Because the concept is relatively new and still evolving, little research is available to guide best practices. There are a number of questions that you might explore.

The hour-long lecture block, for example, is an artifact of scheduling. Videos developed for flipped classrooms typically cover a particular concept and often are 5-10 minutes long. This potentially allows students to review them at separate times rather than in a single session. A considerable body of research suggests that distributed learning can contribute to more meaningful learning than massed practice. Whether students will take advantage of new options to study the material through the week rather than in a single session just before an assignment is due remains to be seen. However, it is now possible to track use of this type of supplemental material to determine how students use it.

Use of the medium in this way will permit instructors to conduct assessments with greater granularity. Teachers can embed questions throughout materials to determine when and where students begin to struggle, rather than waiting for an assessment at the end of a unit.

Digital equity is one issue that educators must address during implementation of flipped classrooms. A survey by the Pew Foundation Internet and American Life project in 2012 reported that differences still exist in high-speed internet access among demographic groups. Bergmann and Sams addressed this issue in their classrooms by providing students who did not have adequate internet access outside school with instructional materials on a CD.

This year we collaborated with a teacher who provided students with video and other instructional materials on an iPod touch. Several nonprofit organizations have begun collecting recycled smartphones for use by schools. Users now upgrade phones every 18 months on average, and just 10% of used phones get recycled, so this is potentially another untapped resource to ensure equitable access. Students could download materials at school to view offline at other times.

Another strategy involves development of lower-bandwidth delivery systems for video. PrimaryAccess, a tool that we developed to allow history students to combine their own text, primary source images, and audio narration to create short online documentary films (see L&L, February, 2010, page 36), makes use of this technique. Moore's law, in concert with technological advances, may in time reduce the bandwidth required and provide more equitable access to wireless technologies.

The flipped classroom concept opens the door to exploration of many instructional approaches and formats. Interactive video is evolving rapidly, offering access to primary source documents, new types of visualizations, and innovative instructional strategies. At its heart, the flipped classroom lies at the intersection of emergent technologies, novel approaches to content enabled by new affordances, and new pedagogical strategies facilitated by both. Ongoing research on best practices related to these new capabilities will provide guidance on ways of facilitating student learning in the most effective manner.

Digital equity is one issue that educators must address during implementation of flipped classrooms.

Glen Bull is co-director of the Center for Technology & Teacher Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Reach him at gbull@virginia.edu .

Bill Ferster is a research professor at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on visualization and innovative uses of digital video. Reach him at bferster@virginia.edu .

Willy Kjellstrom is a graduate fellow in the Center for Technology and Teacher Education and director of the Curry-Albemarle Technology Infusion Program. Reach him at willyk@virginia.edu .