--Originally published at richardctc201

Flipped learning is an innovative, revolutionary way of ‘teaching’ that is having its bum in universities all around the world. For the wsq04, I read Afraj Gill´s blog post about the way that A´s grades spoiled his learning process. Afraj blames the educational system based in obtaining the highest possible grade at all price for mispricing the real goal of education: implementing the acquired knowledge in real life. Afraj says that although he always obtained the highest grades, and he was priced with a lot of scholarships and rewards, he realized that he had never used his knowledge in real life situations. He thinks that grades are the biggest obstacles for trully learning because students memorize big quantities of information in their short-term memory, causing that all those concepts are not ‘fully digested’ by the brain, and finally forgotten.

I agree with Afraj´s point of view. I’m used to obtain the highest grades, but I have always thought that someone´s intelligence isn’t based in answering a sheet of paper nor ‘macheteando’ (colloquial way in Mexico to describe the action of memorizing a big quantity of data) every single word that the teacher says in a class. I reflected about the part where Afraj talks about Finnish educational system (the best in the world) where people don’t attend school until 7 years old, and don’t present tests until their teenagers. In my point of view, Mexico needs to change something in its educational strategy (because it sucks!).

I searched for additional information about this topic and found an article of the University of Queensland, Australia that describes a little more how Flipped classrooms works, but the really interesting part of this article is that in the end, there are shown some benefits of the flipped learning style. I specially liked two of them: curate content, students gathering their own sources, and providing opportunities for discourse, the fact that an independent learning brings a bunch of different points of views of the students resulting in an enriching dialogue because they not only talk about what the professor said but also their own ideas.

Here I leave the link to that Queensland article; it is very interesting, and I expect that it gives more information of this revolutionary topic to my classmates:

http://www.uq.edu.au/teach/flipped-classroom/what-is-fc.html