Have you heard? The latest buzz in teaching and training is turning the traditional classroom structure on its head.

Over the last five years, more and more educators have experimented with a new model of teaching called the flipped classroom. While it’s still a relatively new concept, the early results have been spectacular — improved test scores, better overall grades, and even increased student interest in learning are all common outcomes reported from flipped classes. The success has been so striking that already twenty percent of teachers are preparing to flip at least some of their classes, and a quarter of all school and university administrators are interested in making inverted learning a core part of their institutions’ academics.

So, just how does flipped learning really work? As you’d expect with a new concept, there are many ways to put flipped training into practice. We’ve outlined 7 examples of flipped classrooms in a previous post — it’s a great resource for getting into the details.

At its most basic, however, the flipped classroom simply leverages technology to reverse the regular classroom routine.

• Instead of using class time for lecturing, teachers share lecture materials (typically as a mix of reading and video-recorded lectures) for students to review as homework before the class period.
• With the basics then out of the way, class time can instead be used for interactive discussion, activity, and experimentation, or just free time to complete assignments

The value flipped learning creates is two-fold:

• By delivering the foundational information for students to review ahead of time, it enables teachers to explore a topic in greater depth or breadth.
• By making class time active, students are given the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned and receive instant feedback from their instructor and peers — an environment that’s been demonstrated time and again to improve learning outcomes in students ranging from middle school children to middle-management adults.

With so much potential to improve classroom performance, it’s no surprise that flipped learning is being adopted well beyond the walls of academia — and is now becoming the newest model for enhancing employee training in organizations around the world. And none less than the Association for Talent Development (ATD) is helping to lead the charge.

Flipped Learning: The Next Corporate Training Model Trend

The ATD Learning Technologies team recently published a short post on how organizations might use flipped teaching technology to improve the way their people think, work, and learn.

A key reason for the value that flipped learning can deliver, the team contends, is that it enables teams to “…use technology to present information at the time of need — not try to get it in the head every worker before they need to use it.”

“Trying to get people to remember details about every product offering or troubleshooting procedures is an exercise in futility,” ATD continues. Instead, they propose, “We should offer content presentation systems that work as performance support.”

With the right technology support, the flipped learning model can enable training and communications teams to deliver all the essential details employees need access to — in a format that encourages greater engagement and has been demonstrated to boost memory and information recall.

Bringing The Flipped Learning Model Into Your Organization

As organizations begin to embrace the flipped learning model for employee development, the first question is often a practical one — where to begin?

To give you a head start — and get you thinking about more ways you can make the flip in your own office — here are a few examples of how other businesses are putting flipped learning to work today:

Flipped Training

Traditionally, most corporate training events are classroom-based, scheduled months in advance, and aim to cover as much material as is reasonably possible on a given subject over the course of one or two days.

Flipping this training by asking the instructor to record and share the foundational information for attendees to review ahead of time creates two benefits for your team:

• It can make training more efficient by allowing employees to review the basics as works best for their own schedule and needs, and reducing the number of hours your team must be unavailable while in training.
• It creates a referenceable recording your team can turn to on-demand, meaning if a relevant issue comes up even well after the session, your people will always have somewhere to turn to make sure they’ve got the right answer.

 

A Flipped Learning Example: Quarterly Updates from the CEO

Flipped Executive Town Halls

Executive-led town hall meetings can be a great way to keep your team (or even your entire organization) all up to date and on the same page when it comes to understanding business performance and strategy. But all too often these events simply don’t have enough time to get beyond the high-level numbers and go deeper into the details that might help employees find new ways to boost performance.

By asking your executive presenter to record the high-level performance review to share ahead of time, you can flip your town halls — giving more time for discussing strategy, answering questions, and giving employees a more nuanced understanding of where your company is at and how their roles can help contribute to where it is going.

Flipped Onboarding

Consistent and comprehensive training is essential to helping new hires get up to speed in a role. Yet many organizations leave most onboarding activities to individual hiring managers — meaning more often than not there is quite a bit of variance in what new members of the team learn as they come on board.

To better instill appreciation for organizational missions and values, as well as to ensure the right skills are taught at the right times, more and more companies have turned to flipped learning to create a better onboarding program. With flipped onboarding, hiring managers and learning teams together can design an entire development plan for new hires, introducing them to the company, the product, and even their team. Often this information can even be shared as recorded video training for the new person to review before their first day.

 

A Flipped Learning Example: Interview Training for Managers

Flipped Leadership Development

Grooming the next generation of company executives may be one of the most important tasks any learning and development team takes on. But while the foundational elements of most leadership development programs may be equally applicable for all your up-and-coming execs, more often than not, better results can be had with a more tailored approach that adapts to the needs of each future leader.

For many organizations, flipped learning creates a perfect bridge between traditional training and personal coaching that helps make leadership development more accessible for future executives.

• • By flipping the foundational leadership training and making it available on-demand, learning teams can offer overscheduled executives the information they’ll need in a format they’ll have time for.
  • Once they’ve reviewed the basics as flipped training videos, executives-to-be can work together with a personal coach or trainer — who can then recommend other videos for review, or even record new videos covering additional development concepts as needed.

 

Find Out More About Using Panopto For Flipped Learning!

Flipped learning offers corporate learning teams a whole new means to deliver information and improve training sessions — with demonstrated results that have proven to help boost learner retention and performance.

Panopto’s video platform can help make developing a flipped learning program easy. Panopto runs on any computer and records from virtually any device — from built-in webcams to professional-quality camcorders, and even mobile devices and specialized industry video tools. And every video uploaded to your secure Panopto video library (whether or not it was recorded with Panopto) is automatically transcoded for optimal playback on any device and indexed so that every word spoken or shown on-screen during the recording can be found and fast-forwarded to with a quick keyword search.

For organizations seeking to leverage video technology to flip the way they teach and communicate with their employees, Panopto makes it easy to record anything and find everything. For more information on Panopto, or for a free trial of our video platform software, contact our team today.