More and more often lately I find references to the flipped classroom, sometimes in the most unlikely places.  Recently I found a few references that I find very interesting:

The new president of Dartmouth has been selected and there was a small article about it in the NY Times. In the fourth paragraph of this article I saw the following:

Information technology, he said, has already “significantly changed everything about the way we live our lives,” and he said he expected that it would be increasingly used to take “moments of passive engagement” — like listening to lectures — and “flip” them, so students spend that time on their own, and reserve class time for interacting with the professor and classmates.

I also saw another article in  Campus Technology that explains about how two community colleges in Massachusetts will be trying out a blended model of instruction that integrates online content from edX.  “edX is a non-profit organization founded by HarvardUniversity and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer massive open online courses, or MOOCs.” What these two schools are doing sounds suspiciously like the flipped classroom model.

Both of these articles are talking about flipping their college level classes using a blended approach.  By using edX as a means to implement the flipped classroom, the Massachusetts community colleges will be able to use online resources as a way to open up time in the classroom to more fully engage the students.

The movement of the flipped classroom to the college level will give more prestige to the flipped classroom model. All us flippers should be watching these developments and use them to help convince administrators in our schools that the flipped classroom  is worth implementing.