Flip: The academic Tik-Tok Flip: The academic Tik-Tok

At the School of Languages and Cultures, Flip has been used as an engaging and authentic learning and assessment tool, very well suited to language learning. In an example of scenario-based learning in French, students recorded a very short video pitching their services as a tour guide to visitors to their city.

Flip has proven to be a useful tool more broadly for oral presentations, interviews, case studies and short authentic simulations in 12 different courses, including French, Korean, Japanese, Applied Linguistics and in Cross-Cultural Communication.

In a flipped COMU2040 classroom, students used Flip to convey and apply key learning from modules in cross-cultural communication. This became a regular oral reflective learning and assessment exercise, requiring students to record themselves explaining and exploring their conceptual knowledge from readings, lecture and workshop material in response to a prompt set by the teaching staff. This set of assessed tasks helped both reinforce learning and give the instructor insight quickly into what interested the students and how well they are understanding the material. If the set task involves students viewing each other’s videos, on board learning analytics allow evaluation of engagement in the task.

As an assessment, Flip is best suited for ongoing formative assessment, though it can be useful for low-stakes summative assessment as well. One of the strong learning outcomes of this type of assessment method is its potential to build student connectedness, sense of belonging and confidence, especially within an online environment. It is a technology they are comfortable and familiar with. It follows good assessment principles of being varied, progressive, emotive, while promoting peer-to-peer learning. It is ideally coupled with larger weighed assessment where students can provide both a written and verbal response to their reflection, essay , journal or other written assignment.