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I don’t know if this is something that other faculty have noticed at their institutions, but after years of relentless propaganda in favor of the flipped classroom, my department is witnessing a massive wave of people unflipping previously flipped courses.

Part of it is that our biggest flipped-classroom zealots have retired. It’s been almost comical to see their area colleagues collectively release bated breaths and immediately revert to traditional lectures. There seems to have been quite the cult of personality associated with classroom flipping, where the person who created videos first basically expected others to use their materials, thereby inserting themselves into everyone’s classroom under the guise of benevolently reducing the colleagues’ future workload. This ended up having an adverse effect on the teaching evaluations of those who used someone else’s videos, and in particular hurt junior faculty, because students had the impression that the person in the class with them wasn’t doing much work. Also, no two people cover the material in the exact same way, so in-person interactions and class activities led by one instructor are often misaligned with pre-recorded videos made by someone else. Yet, it everyone then ends up making their own videos, a huge amount of work is now repeated by multiple people and the whole reduction of colleagues’ workload is no longer a benefit of this class modality. Even when one teaches using one’s own videos, there is still natural content drift after several offerings; based on class feedback, one moves things around, emphasizes certain topics and deemphasize others. Expecting a set of videos, no matter how well done, to be the definitive word on the material for more than a couple of years has always been a misguided premise. Sure, videos are helpful, especially when students miss a class, but not as the main delivery method if in-person lectures are available. (By the way, I have heard students complaining that videos from 2018 are ancient. Maybe not objectively so, but to them, seven years ago was middle school or early high school; to them, it certainly feels ancient.)

There is no doubt that Covid and all the mandatory virtual learning strongly contributed to this trend, and the pervasiveness of videos on all social media is an additional culprit. Students may be used to learning from videos, but they are also sick and tired of watching videos. They want to be in the classroom, interacting with real, live people. Attendance in flipped classes has dropped precipitously from pre-Covid levels, and those classes that require attendance are filled with students who didn’t do the readings or watch the videos because they realize in-class activities focus on catching up for the unprepared.

Theoretically, the flipped classroom offers a great experience for motivated, prepared students who are eager to engage with the material. In reality, you get a small group of kids at every table, struggling to figure out what to do because no one has read or watched anything so no one knows where to even start. At least with a traditional lecture, you get butts in seats and all students hear the same material in its entirety. They are able to take notes (a lost art, given how many of them listen with arms crossed) and ask questions. If one is averse to being a sage on the stage, traditional lecture can always be augmented by various in-class activities. As instructor, you cannot control what students do or what they focus on outside of class, but in class their attention is yours and this remains the best opportunity to guide student learning.

Blogosphere, how are the flipped, hybrid, and traditional classrooms working out at your institution? Have you introduced active learning elements into your classroom or perhaps worked within a fully flipped modality?