Midterm time...again?

How many exams?

I attended undergraduate studies at the Universita' di Bologna, Italy. At the time, most courses entailed a single exam, typically oral, to be taken sooner or later after the year-long course ended. That system has procrastination and last-minute cramming written all over it.  My flipped genetics course is the antithesis of the "exam later" model.  In the ten weeks of the term there are five midterm exams, one every two weeks. Some students complain about the frequency of the exams, others grow to like the "exam now" model and recognize its usefulness. For what it is worth, the exam now strategy could be named "no man [or woman] left behind".

The no man left behind model

A typical 10-week course has ~2 midterm exams. I decided to administer more frequent midterm exams as part of a plan to prevent procrastination and improve curriculum immediacy. The need is exemplified as follows: consider three related concepts, A-B-C. Understanding C requires a good grasp of A and B. I found it frustrating when teaching C was hampered by A-B ignorance. 

Figure 1. Responses to a clicker question.
Green marks the correct answer

The existence of a widespread lacuna in the class becomes obvious when you use clickers. Fig. 1 exemplifies a lost class: only 1/4 are answering correctly. My teaching strategy is not to leave any such gap uncovered.

Students may experience difficulty in answering a given quiz for a number of reasons. Addressing the problem in a timely manner, however, is easy only if clarifying the matter does not involve re-explaining key, fundamental concepts. 

Implementing the model

Avoiding procrastination and ensuring student adherence to the course information flow requires intruding into students' study habits and often colliding with their expectations, as exemplified by this post in an online prof evaluation site:

"Best way to describe this class: heavy. Flipped class means a lot of external work (videos, readings, online quizzes) and a lot of attention required in class (clicker points). He goes from Mendel to CRISPR in deep detail, with tricky questions. You HAVE to know your stuff ridiculously well to get a A or B. 5 midterms."

Yes, this student did not award me the hot chili pepper award. But, as explained in the student response post, many other students appreciate the benefits of the model. Its effect on study habit is demonstrated by students use of the Canvas site (Fig. 2), which peaks at most midterms.

Figure 2. Weekly page views to BIS101 Canvas site.

Conclusion

Five midterms come with some overhead: preparing and administering them requires extra effort. Nonetheless, I see obvious benefits in the class consistency and ability to enter new genetics grounds. 

Designing a flipped course in genetics

In 2016 and 2017 I designed and offered at UC Davis a flipped course in genetics. A partial version is available to the public.

Structure and design of the flipped course

Figure 1. Overall course structure and strategy. 

My flipped course is structured as illustrated in Figure 1. Students use Canvas, a Learning Management System (LMS), to study material provided in modules. The material includes content pages, videos and book assignments. Many students feel that the book is superfluous. Students test and expand their knowledge by taking online quizzes. They come to class prepared and engage in instructor's lead discussion and clicker quizzes. An midterm exam is administered every 2 weeks (5 total). Together with the final exam, these in-class exams amount to 75% of the course points. The remaining 25% of the points are earned with activities: clicker questions and online quizzes.

I use the Canvas LMS to provide 15 "modules", which are containers of web pages and quizzes. Each module features the following (Fig. 2):

1. A topic, such as Mendelian Genetics
2. Objectives detailing the knowledge to be achieved and expected mastery levels
3. Content pages: short descriptions and explanations with embedded videos
4. Graded practice quizzes (GPQ): following each content page students can test their mastery on online graded quizzes that can be taken as many times as desired. The highest score is retained. 
5. Module end quiz (MEQ): at the end of the module students take a graded quiz that resembles an online midterm. 
6. The Mendel Laws module and the Meiosis modules are available to the public. 

Figure 2. Module organization.

How effective is this structure?

I have implemented this flipped course for two years, in which I have taught it twice (once to two different sections).  In my first year I taught a hybrid version (~65% flipped). The second year I flipped it completely.  Overall, I am moderately happy with it. There are several things to fix and many to improve. There is plenty of room for new ideas and further innovation.

Students complain frequently that the course involves too much work, but at the same time agree that they learned a lot. I will discuss students response and early assessment in future posts. From the instructor's point of view,  it was definitely a lot of work. I will discuss the rationale for doing it in a future post. Additionally, I found that I could cover less material than I was able to cover when I taught this course conventionally.  On the other hand, I felt better about students' mastery of the material and I felt more effective and satisfied in this teaching framework than in the conventional one.