Last semester, I listened to Dr. Jennifer Spohrer’s presentation, Blended Learning in a Liberal Arts Setting, hosted by NITLE. While blended / flipped learning offers  the opportunity to engage with students in a different way, one point of pain for faculty is time. It takes time to create lessons. It takes time to record lectures. It takes time to edit video.

One lesson I learned early on when I worked on digital library projects was to embrace the three R’s of sustainability: reduce, reuse, and recycle. It all comes back to time and using your time effectively. Just because you can code something, doesn’t mean you should. The same applies to flipped lessons. As a subject expert in your discipline, you can create online lessons for your students to view. Of course, being a subject expert does not you are necessarily a wonderful online lecturer, but still you can create an online lesson. The question is should you?

Reduce Time and Reuse Preëxisting Lectures

A great start for faculty members who want to test out flipped learning without investing a lot of time is to locate lectures which they may use in their classes. Don’t organize a whole class around flipped learning, but find one or two videos that seem pertinent. Two resources are Knowmia and TED-Ed. Due to a cluttered design, over abundance of ads, and unfortunate name, I’ll mention TeacherTube as another site that exists, but one you may not want to use.

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