By Dr. Sadiq A, Professor of TKM College of Engineering.

Discuss Education BarCamp was an Education meetup that was organized by Linways Technologies which brought together a group of educators, academicians, and education enthusiasts to share and propose their ideas on making advancements in the higher education system. In the discussion held there were representatives from different educational sectors to actively participate and to deliver their ideas.

A session that grabbed great attention among the audience in the BarCamp was Flip Class-Based Group Quiz presented by Dr. Sadiq A, Professor of TKM College of Engineering. It was a methodology developed by him and experimented in his own curriculum, which showed a great result in student performance and promoted active learning mechanism.

Active Learning

Dr. Sadiq A initiated the session with a discussion on active learning. 

Active learning is a form of learning in which teachers undertake the strategy to involve students in the learning process more directly than in other methods. He added that in the teaching-learning process, there exists great importance in making students active participants. The method on which he gave emphasis was the Flipped Classroom technique.  

Flipped Classroom is a widely used method for implementing the active learning process.

In this method study materials will be given to students in advance, this helps students of different learning pace and levels to take the required time and perceive the contents.

In the classroom, a discussion will be conducted on the topics which they have studied and the students can raise their doubts and give out a summary on the portion learned in the presence of a teacher. The discussion helps in clarifying the doubts that arise and correcting the misinterpretation that may have occurred in the self-learning process. Also, students can be made to work out with questions and assignments on the topic given.

What is Flip Class-Based Group Quiz?

Flip Class-Based Group Quiz is a very effective mechanism through which active learning is brought to a classroom. He explained that the method combines the benefits of both flipped-classroom learning and quiz by making some slight modifications in the procedure in which it is conducted. This method opens up a platform for learning, discussion, clarification, and performance evaluation sessions. This improves the active participation of students.

The Characteristics of Flip Class-Based Group Quiz 

Providing Course Materials 

Course materials such as reference text, video tutorials, and resources are to be given to students in advance. It helps students to save time spent on finding the course materials also prevents them from getting the wrong information from unreliable resources. Once they have the materials students will be given a time frame to prepare for the quiz, it helps to learn the given topics in a self-paced manner. When the students learn by themself it opens them a way to research and learn widely on the topics of interest. 

Allocating Topic

Allocating topics for a quiz is a very crucial part. In this method, students are made to learn the topics by themselves initially. So topics can be selected only by taking into consideration the learning capacity of all the students in the class. Topics can be allocated by the teacher and the students can be kept informed about the topic selected for the quiz.

Scheduling Quiz

The quiz can be scheduled in regular class hours without demanding extra time. It will be convenient for the students as well as faculty.

Setting up Teams

When the quiz is conducted students will be divided into different groups of equal capacity in an unbiased manner. This ensures the active involvement of all the students. In a classroom with a strength of 70-100 students, there can be 3-5 groups.

Preparing Questions

Students are asked to prepare questions and answers by themselves on the topic given. When this is done by different groups, all the expected questions from a topic gets covered and that helps them to reduce the time spend for exam preparations on these topics.

Verifying Course Materials

On the day of the quiz, students are asked to bring study material to the class to discuss and share additional information with the class. At this point, the faculty can give the corrected information if the student has referred to any irrelevant material and grasped the wrong information.

Marking System

A point system will be there to award points to the group based on the questions asked. This creates a kind of sportsman spirit among students and encourages them to study the topics well and participate in the quiz.

Quiz Master

The instructor will be taking up the role of a quizmaster. He acts as the regulator during the session. Quizmaster can ensure that the questions raised and answers delivered are relevant to the topic and are precise information.

After giving an idea on the structure of this technique, Dr. Sadiq explained his own experiment in implementing this technique. The study materials were handed over to the students on the previous day of the quiz and the topic was also given. Then he laid out the rules of the quiz.

Rules set for the Quiz

  • The duration of the quiz session was 60 mins.
  • 30 seconds were given to a team to ask the question.
  • The group which receives the question should answer the question in 60 Seconds and they will be awarded 10 points.
  • If they fail to give the answer the question will be passed and the team which gives the correct answer gets 5 points.
  • If no teams including the questioning team fail to answer the Quizmaster earns 5 points.

Advantages and Conclusions

  • The technique enabled the self-assessments of students. 
  • Each student was made to think as the smartest student in the class.
  • Enhanced confidence and enthusiasm in students.
  • Faculty can note down points to be corrected for later discussions without interfering with the quiz.
  • Showed outstanding results when a test was given on this topic later.

Challenges: 

  • The instructor’s intelligence is also tested.
  • Should provide study sufficient materials 
  • The instructor should be able to moderate the class properly

Audience Interactions 

This was a topic that embarked on great interaction among the audience. 

The interaction was started off by Dr. T. K. Mani sir asking about the rewards given to students.

Dr. Sadiq told he rewards winning team with toffees to create positive reinforcement in them.

Dr. Mary Fatima Cross, Associate Professor from SCMS, asked if any introduction was required for initiating the quiz.

Dr. Sadiq replied, no introductions were given prior and the session started off straight away with the quiz. She also enquired about the difficulty level of questions asked. To this, his response was, as the students always tried to outmatch other groups, they were equipped with hard to crack questions.

Dr. Mahalingam P R also shared his experience with such an experiment with his students when he conducted a group quiz in his class.

Miss Abhirami from Linways asked about finding time for these types of techniques in regular class hours.

Dr. Sadiq`s explanation was that the technique cannot be implemented on all the topics, so he analyzed the syllabus and this technique was applied only on selected topics. Thus he could effectively manage time for completing the syllabus on time.

Also published on Medium.

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