Multimedia in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education Commentary: The Khan Academy and the Day-night Flipped Classroom

摘要

Teaching by night and reflecting on a subject by day is the way that Salman Khan sees education evolving in the age of online lectures [1]. Revolutionary approaches, regardless of merit, are opposed by the established practitioners of a field. In education, there is an aphorism that the only group more conservative than teachers is their students. This accounts for the failure of many innovative teaching approaches because students were not in sympathy with the approach. However, the Khan approach is being avidly taken up by learners so we have a situation of students imposing their preferences on a reactionary teaching profession. Chaos theory postulates that there are nodes of stability, like warm ages and ice ages or magnetic pole reversals, and they flip relatively suddenly. Students are now leading a flip in the paradigm that has prevailed for millennia. That paradigm is that teaching is a daytime task and making sense and applying the learning is a nocturnal activity. We are now facing a new reality where conventional teaching is running into conflict with the way students are choosing to learn. My lectures currently attract a live audience of only 50% of the class and many of my colleagues report much lower attendances. The students have changed, not our lectures. In my teaching, I now commend students to take the Khan lectures on metabolism and my feedback is that the Khan lectures have helped them to make sense of it.