[volta83]

", I find the concept of ingesting content at your pace and then talking about it in class very interesting."

It's called a "flipped-classroom".

The teacher gives you material to read or watch at home before the class, and then in the class it just asks if anyone had any questions, and they can go over these together.

As a teacher it is super useful because you get to learn first hand which concepts the student didn't understand.

And as a student you can read or watch something whenever you want at the speed that you want, and if you don't understand something you can ask about it in class.

With some experience, teachers can also use the flipped-classroom model to focus only on the hardest part of a particular lecture. You can rely that some student is going to have trouble with it at home, so you can prepare before hand to the lecture to how to address that particular question (and once you have done the class a couple of times, you get pretty good at it).

There is no need to waste teacher and student time during 1:1 interactions on "easy" stuff that everyone can just read at home.

[fuzzer37]

How do you deal with shy students, or ones who don't like to participate? This model sounds interesting, but I can't imagine exclusively using this method.

[trobertson]

> How do you deal with shy students, or ones who don't like to participate?

With students who aren't participating in the current model? They will (have the opportunity to) do better than they are now, as when they watch prerecorded lectures they can skip back to parts they didn't understand. As opposed to their current behavior of not speaking up and, therefore, not being able to go over the content again.

[volta83]

> How do you deal with shy students, or ones who don't like to participate?

This method allows students to learn at home at their own pace, and use face-time with experts to asks questions.

Just learning at home at your own pace is a net win for all students.

Those who are a little shy, come to class, and learn something from the questions of others.

Those who are more shy, don't even come to class. They can read the stuff at home, and have ~2 hours extra per week to do other stuff.

We have 1:1 tutoring 2 per week (students have to get an online ticket), and they can also ask us privately per email, but in my experience, students that are "too shy" to go to class and ask questions in front of others are also often "too shy" to asks questions privately.

The other aspect of these is homeworks. Our homeworks allow groups, but they are thought of as "individual homeworks". We recommend people do them on their own. This means that non-shy people as a group get them done faster and often better, but it also means that shy people doing them on their own, end up learning more and performing better in the exams.

We don't grade homeworks, just pass or not pass, but passing them is required to be allowed to take the exam.

Still, we do internally grade them, and people that do them well alone do perform better in the exam.

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In my opinion, the only "downside" for "shy" students, is that since we give them the freedom to not attend _any_ classes, they might decide not to do so. That means, no access to new friends, new colleagues, in person learning groups, isolation, and well understanding the hardest parts of the material might cost them more time if they are "on their own".

Most still make it. Some do find learning groups or new friends in the class forum, some do better than many students that do attend classes, etc.

Having taught many flipped and non-flipped (classic) classes, I never had the feeling that forcing people to attend class fixed any issues related to "shy-ness".

Students are how they are, I'm neither their parent, nor counselor, nor psychologist, nor am I qualified to do any of these things. I'm their teacher for a specific kind of content. I want the content to be useful and applicable to them, so that they can use it in their careers to be successful, whatever successful means to each of them. I also want them to enjoy the content, so that they can learn it easier.

For me this means giving them as many options as possible, so that they can master the content in whatever way makes the most sense to each of them.