Flipped Textbooks - American Chemical Society

Chemistry Classes. Brian C. Goess* and Andrea Tartaro. Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science, Furman University,. 3300 Poinsett Highway ... in...
1 downloads 15 Views 247KB Size
Chapter 10

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

Flipped Textbooks: Student-Created Online Wiki Textbooks for Intermediate and Advanced Chemistry Classes Brian C. Goess* and Andrea Tartaro Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science, Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Highway, Greenville, South Carolina 29613, United States *E-mail: [email protected].

Over the past eight years, over 200 students at Furman University have authored a “flipped” electronic wiki textbook to accompany their intermediate-level course in bio-organic chemistry. Many students report through in-depth interviews that this electronic textbook is as useful in this course as similar textbooks created by professional authors. This chapter describes the flipped textbook and provides guidelines for how to successfully encourage the creation of a flipped textbook. Furthermore, evidence is presented to support the hypothesis that the language student authors use to communicate scientific information throughout the flipped textbook may lead to improved learning outcomes for students who subsequently utilize the textbook as a study aid in the course.

Introduction In 2008, the chemistry department at Furman University retired its traditional sophomore-level organic chemistry course and launched a new two-course sequence consisting of one accelerated course in traditional synthetic organic chemistry followed by a new course in bio-organic chemistry (1). The need for such a change was soon confirmed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), who wrote in 2009 that “…course requirements have been static for decades and may not accurately reflect the essential competencies every entering medical student must © 2017 American Chemical Society Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

have mastered, today and in the future (2).” As the vast majority of students enrolled in our organic chemistry courses are pursuing careers in health-related fields, the purpose of this redesign was to better address the needs of pre-medical students taking the new (2015) Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) while preserving the essential features of the traditional sequence that prepare chemistry majors for advanced degrees and employment. The novelty of this sophomore-level stand-alone bio-organic chemistry course presented a significant challenge at the time, namely lack of an existing textbook covering the course material (3). Based on education research documenting the improved learning outcomes derived from collaborative student learning activities (4), and based on the spectacular success of crowd-sourced knowledge transmission in online wikis such as Wikipedia (5), we chose to give students the training and tools necessary to create for themselves an electronic wiki textbook to accompany the course. Over the past eight years nearly five hundred Furman students have participated in this “flipped textbook” project as content authors, peer reviewers, editors, and content consumers. We chose the phrase “flipped textbook” to describe our wiki in order to emphasize its conceptual relationship to flipped classrooms (6), which similarly emphasize the value of student collaboration in content mastery. The result is an entirely student-created online textbook that has unique advantages over traditional textbooks, including the ability to be edited and improved in real time. Indeed, many students report through in-depth interviews that this electronic textbook is as useful in this course as similar textbooks created by professional authors have been in their other courses. In this chapter, we will describe how to create a flipped textbook for an intermediate or advanced chemistry course and report our initial findings on why such texts may lead to improved learning outcomes.

Flipped Textbook Creation The most important initial consideration in facilitating flipped textbook creation is the foundation – the wiki platform on which the electronic textbook will be created. An appropriate platform, one that is easy to use for content creators, users, and instructors, must possess three features: (1) a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing interface, so that no programming knowledge is required for students to create and edit content; (2) search functionality, so that users can rapidly find information they seek, much like one would use the index of a traditional text; and (3) a robust history feature, one that both records the contributions of individual students, which is useful for grading, and that allows any previous version of a particular page to be accessed and reloaded, which is useful in case valuable content is accidentally erased by a student during the course of editing or for “resetting” the entire wiki to an earlier state. In addition to these three key features, two additional features are desirable but not essential. First, it is helpful if the platform allows someone with limited programming knowledge to design and install small plug-ins that simplify certain 132 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

repetitive tasks, such as posting chemical drawing images. Second, availability of a low- or no-cost option is ideal in order to remove a cost barrier to experimentation and adoption. Our initial efforts in flipped textbook development were executed on a PBworks wiki space, which met all of these criteria (7). Our current bio-organic flipped textbook is housed within Confluence (8), a pay-to-use wiki platform that our university adopted early in the development process. Importantly, we allow students to explore the use of wiki technology in the prequel organic course via a tutorial lab and simple independent content creation and editing exercises, which includes instruction on how to create, post and edit chemical drawing images. This preparation ensures that students are familiar with the platform at the start of the sequel bio-organic chemistry course, which allows them to make immediate contributions to the flipped textbook. The only instructor-generated content on our flipped textbook is a home page consisting of links to individual “chapters (9).” Each wiki chapter corresponds to the content contained in one fifty-minute lecture in the course, and, as such, contains less content than a typical textbook chapter. Because course content was created from scratch, it was possible to create self-contained lectures that each fit within one lecture period. In the first offering of the course (Fall 2008), each student was asked to spend between eight and ten hours creating one wiki chapter from a blank slate. Students were reminded that their audience was not the instructor but their classmates and all future students in the course. Though their contributions were graded in order to encourage thoughtful participation, in order to encourage uninhibited participation without regard for style, grammar, or correctness, the grades were based solely on the instructor’s perception of time and effort expended. Since the course was created essentially from scratch and no textbook was used, the students had a limited repertoire of materials from which to build content including: their own notes from class supplemented by their notes and textbook from the prequel accelerated organic chemistry class, a short pre-reading created by the instructors outlining the concepts they would encounter in the first half of each class, problem sets and solutions created by the instructors, and whatever additional resources they found elsewhere and deemed useful. Students were not specifically directed to any outside resources, such as biochemistry textbooks, though they were encouraged to use such resources provided they included appropriate citations. Students understood that the university’s rules on plagiarism were in effect even though this flipped textbook was intended for internal use only. They were, however, permitted to use class materials created by the instructor without citation. Since most students chose not to include outside content in their chapters, concern over authorship of content was minimal. Each initial draft chapter was anonymously peer-reviewed by a classmate, with the exchange of information handled by the instructor over email. Peer review accomplishes a number of desirable outcomes (10, 11). First, it exposes students, often for the first time, to the idea of peer review, a fundamental pillar of scientific knowledge creation and authentication. Second, it allows the author to make often significant improvements to the writing in their initial draft based on their peer review. Finally, it reinforces for both the author and the peer reviewer that the audience for this content is other students, not the instructor. Our instruction to the 133 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

peer reviewers was simple, open-ended, and modeled largely after what happens in the chemistry literature: make whatever comments you feel would help the author improve the value of this chapter for its readers. As with chapter creation, peer reviews were graded on effort alone. Students responded well to the peer reviewing task, most often providing advice on how to make sentences or diagrams clearer. Frequently, students offered more thoughtful analysis including suggestions for making content more accurate or for making entire sections fit better within the overall narrative structure. Students responded equally well to their peer reviews. Though they were told by their instructor that not all of their peer’s suggestions must be followed, students generally addressed all suggestions. Again, revised chapters were graded on effort alone based on how thoughtfully the students responded to their peer review. The grades for all three aspects of their work on the flipped textbook (creating a chapter, providing a peer review of another’s chapter, and revising their own chapter based on peer review) was worth a total 10% of their overall course grade. The revised chapters created by these student-authors strongly resembled the structure and content of the lectures themselves. This is not surprising due to the nature of the course and the uniqueness of the task. With no standard textbook to follow, and with little training provided in their general chemistry courses on how to effectively research information in the scientific literature, students naturally clung to the most authoritative information available, namely the information provided in lecture. Not surprisingly, then, the wiki content largely paralleled lecture content, albeit with text and diagrams that lacked the polish of those created by expert professionals. By the end of the course, students had created over thirty-five chapters of content. On average, chapters contained roughly 1000 words, each illustrated with chemical drawing diagrams (9). Of note, no class time was devoted to this project beyond explaining the motivation for this project during the first lecture day. The course is entirely lecture-based, tests occur in the evening, and problem set work is handled during office hours. Initial users of the flipped textbook were concerned that the wiki lacked an important feature of traditional textbooks, namely short, in-chapter drill problems designed to facilitate mastering course concepts in preparation for the more challenging end-of-chapter problems. To address this concern, some students in subsequent offerings of the course were assigned drill problems of either the instructor’s or their own creation. Students then filmed short (3-10 minute) videos of themselves solving the problems, and both the drill problems and solutions videos were posted at the end of each wiki chapter (12). Our initial assessment of the first “edition” of the flipped textbook yielded two important conclusions. First, the created content was, for the most part, accurate. Many errors of substance were weeded out through peer review, and we were confident that, over time, the remaining errors would be corrected by future student editors (13). Second, though the chapters followed the structure of the lectures, the language used by the student authors to describe course content was quite different than the language used by the expert instructors who first presented that content to the students in class. This finding has led to a fruitful and ongoing research program, some aspects of which will be described herein. 134 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

Flipped Textbook Curation In subsequent course offerings (2009-2010), students were assigned an editorial role for a specific wiki chapter and were tasked with improving its content. Students were apprised of the typical range of editorial changes that scientific documents undergo, including error correction, clarification, elaboration, and new content creation. Students were also told the amount of time they should spend working on the assignment to earn the maximum effort grade, but, in an effort to preserve the primacy of the student voice that was emerging in the flipped textbook, they were not offered any suggestions on what specific editorial changes to make. In contrast to the uniformly excellent productivity we observed for student-authors creating initial content, the student-editors demonstrated a wide range of approaches to their task. The majority of editors took a peer review-style approach and worked to improve the existing content without significantly altering the structure of that content. Some student-editors, however, took an alternate approach of eliminating most or all existing content and replacing it with their own content, essentially recasting their role as a student-author working from a blank slate. Some found the editing role intimidating and made few to no changes, often justifying their inaction by stating that the existing content was excellent and they could think of no meaningful way to improve it. Through in-depth interviews of student-editor volunteers from these classes, we found that students held a range of opinions on the value of student-created content that no doubt impacted their approach to the editing assignment. While many students held some version of the perspective shared by mature scientists, namely that scientific knowledge is created and communicated by people and can therefore be modified over time by others, some suggested that they had little faith in the content created by their peers, while others felt they had no authority to change existing content. Though we did not attempt to correlate student opinions of the value of student-created content with their approach to the editing assignment, we suspect there is a strong relationship between them and hope to investigate this phenomenon more fully in the future. In more recent course offerings, the existing wiki textbook was made available to students, but no related editing assignment was given. As such, these students participated in the wiki as content consumers only, much the way students would engage with a traditional course textbook created by an expert. Students generally embraced the flipped textbook as an authoritative source of information, though some reported not using it at all, favoring the instructor’s lectures as the only authentic source of information. On course evaluations from two recent offerings of the course, 88% of students agreed with the statement that the wiki was “a useful resource” and that it was “useful to have organic chemistry described by peers”, and 94% agreed that the “wiki project should continue”. We noticed throughout the flipped textbook creation process that early content, no matter the quality, tended to be replaced over time with future student’s subsequent contributions. Student-editors seem to prefer either to tweak existing content or to replace it entirely with content of their own creation, the result of which is a progression away from the early content. The hybrid option of preserving the existing content and appending one’s own material as an alternate 135 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

perspective was rarely utilized by our student editors. In an attempt to mitigate this effect, in our most recent course offerings students were assigned the role of curator and were specifically tasked with reviewing the editorial history of their assigned chapter and deciding if any material that had at one point been deleted by a previous student might be helpful if it were brought back to the fore. Students found this task the most challenging of all, as evidenced by the relatively small amount of content that was restored by the curators.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

Flipped Textbooks and Learning Outcomes Though the contributions of our student authors and editors vary in significant ways, we observed one commonality that has persisted throughout many iterations of the bio-organic flipped textbook: the written language chosen by students to describe scientific phenomena to each other differs from the language chosen by expert authors and instructors to describe these same phenomena to the students. These differences go beyond those one might reasonably expect considering the students have only recently encountered and, to varying extents, mastered the information that they are writing about. That is to say, while it is clear that the student authors and editors of the flipped textbook write with less precision, clarity, accuracy, formalism, and style than an expert author of a traditional textbook, they write with more colorful and peer-oriented language than most expert authors. In-depth interviews of students who used this flipped textbook as consumers revealed that most students found it to be a helpful, and for some students an essential, study aid. In particular, our previous analysis found that many appreciated the creative, peer-directed language used by the student authors.14 Some illustrative comments include:



• •



“it’s really similar to what [the professor] says, but I feel like he like says it in the formal manner… [the students] say in a little bit different way, but, you know, still the same material. It just helps me to understand it a little bit better and it’s just a little less formal… I’m kind of understanding how they understood it.” “[Students are] able to say exactly what they need to without… saying words that no one understands.” “[it helped my learning] to present it in a way that’s a little bit unique from just what you heard in class… you could [develop] a tip or trick so that you can remember something. I think… coming up with those definitely helped my learning.” “[Students] are able to put their input, or the way they perceive the teacher… and I think that’s very beneficial.”

Though these quotations demonstrate that use of the flipped textbook improved students’ experience of the class, we wondered whether their learning outcomes were impacted in a positive way as well. We began our investigation 136 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

by focusing on the language used by our student authors when writing or editing chapters, since it was this “personality” and “simpler” “conversational language” that many of our interviewees singled out as the most helpful feature of the flipped textbook. Interestingly, we discovered that these instances of what we call “creative language use” were most prevalent in the initial version of the wiki text, the one generated by our student authors from a blank slate. Yet, despite student interviewees’ stated appreciation of the creative language, we found that this language was gradually replaced by subsequent student editors with more traditional scientific prose (14). Though the reasons for this are difficult to ascertain, it takes only one student editor to replace with more traditional scientific prose a passage written with the dynamic voice of a previous student author. And once traditional textbook-like prose is in place, students seem reluctant to replace it. Nonetheless, we observed that the original student authors tend to write in a peer-directed voice that does not resemble that of expert textbook authors. If there was value in that voice, such as improved learning outcomes in our course when students encountered peer-authored and peer-directed content alongside content presented by an expert instructor, instructors would do well to encourage its preservation. For this reason we sought to catalogue and classify creative language used by our student authors in the initial version of the flipped textbook. We then followed these instances through subsequent rounds of editing by new students, in order to determine whether certain types of creative language uses were deemed more valuable by peers, and were thus preserved through more rounds of editing (14). Our analysis focused on the chapter of the wiki that was associated with the lecture describing the chemistry of serine proteases, enzymes that are responsible for hydrolyzing proteins in cells. We identified and catalogued a number of forms of creative language use throughout the original chapter including (14):





• • • •

Figures of speech and colloquial forms: “Because things like heptavalent bonds happen, but that’s just a matter of course” or “until something comes along to put the humiliated protease out of its misery.” Cultural references: “We as lowly humans trying to imitate God/evolution/flying spaghetti monster/whatever suits your pleasure” or “the sparknotes version.” Encouraging words: “Don’t worry” or “Pretty simple, right? Let’s keep going.” Puns: “Oh my gauche” or “causes the histidine to feel more negative” Anthropomorphisms: “an unsuspecting water molecule moves in” or “a really lazy little protein” Metaphors: “chain gang partnership of the catalytic triad.”

In all we documented twenty-six instances of creative language use in this chapter. Of these twenty-six, over the next six rounds of editing eleven were replaced with more scientific prose, seven were deleted entirely, and five were 137 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

modified without being entirely replaced or deleted. During that time, sixteen new creative language uses were documented, five of which were changed or deleted in subsequent rounds of editing. At present, nineteen instances of creative language use remain in this chapter. These results are consistent with the observed general pattern that the highest density of creative language usage is in the initial creation of the chapter, and that over time these tend to be replaced, deleted, or modified in favor of more scholarly scientific prose (14). We were intrigued by the relatively rare examples of creative language use that persisted through multiple rounds of student editing. For any content to persist, multiple future student editors must deem that content appropriate and useful, and they must choose not to replace that content with their own contribution. And given the frequency with which existing creative language was overwritten by future student editors, we reasoned that any examples of creative language that persisted through multiple rounds of editing must have special pedagogical value. One such example, the “chain gang partnership” highlighted above, is a clever metaphor (and an even more clever pun) illustrating how three active site amino acid side chains of the protease work together as a catalytic triad to accelerate the hydrolysis of an amide substrate. Like a chain gang is linked together at the feet to ensure cooperation, the catalytic triad of the enzyme is linked together through chemical bonds. This evocative metaphor conveys the essence of a challenging chemical principle, namely catalytic rate acceleration through enforced co-localization of multiple functional groups in a folded enzyme’s active site, in non-chemical language — a chain gang. We found other examples of preserved evocative metaphors throughout the flipped textbook. By preserving these student-created metaphors throughout multiple semesters of editing, the students themselves are suggesting that they perceive such metaphors to have value in their learning process. We hypothesized that students encountering these preserved evocative metaphors in the flipped textbook would better remember the underlying chemical principles. To assess whether or not these preserved metaphors indeed had such pedagogical value, we administered a twenty-question multiple choice final exam, three questions of which were based on preserved metaphors, to a recent class of twenty-four students. Relevant data are collected in Table 1 (15). On this exam, two questions directly tested key chemical principles illustrated by a preserved evocative metaphor found in the student-authored flipped textbook (Table 1, Student). One additional question was prepared based on a metaphor created by the instructor, introduced in class, and incorporated into the flipped textbook by a student-author (Table 1, Instructor). For example, the question inspired by the “chain gang partnership” metaphor described above was presented as follows: Which of the following is an important feature of serine protease catalysis? a. b.

Use of a cofactor to accomplish catalysis that would be difficult to accomplish with amino acid side chains alone Amino acid side chain residues working cooperatively to accomplish catalysis 138

Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

c. d. e.

Inhibition of catalysis by stable analogs of substrate transition states Ideal positioning of amino acid side chain residues leading to diffusion-limited ("perfect") catalysis Active site amino acid side chain residues coordinating to a metal cofactor to facilitate catalysis

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

The correct answer (b) is reinforced by the chain gang metaphor. In a different chapter in which the concept of diffusion-limited enzyme catalysis is discussed, a student offers the following analogy: “This can be thought of as an assembly line metaphor. In [one kind of diffusion-limited enzyme] catalyzed reaction, the [enzyme] puts his parts together faster than he receives them and must wait on the assembly line to send more.” Based on this metaphor, the following question was presented on the final exam:

The metaphor of an assembly line worker who assembles his parts faster than the conveyor belt delivers new parts to be assembled is most appropriately applied to which enzyme?

We also created two questions that were on the topic described by a preserved evocative metaphor but that tested a different aspect of that topic (Table 1, Related). In one example, a student referred to cisplatin bound to DNA as a “Winnebago”-sized inhibitor of DNA polymerase, but the associated exam question asked about the mechanism of cisplatin’s reaction with DNA. The remaining fifteen questions tested principles that were not illustrated by student-authored creative language, metaphor or otherwise, in the flipped textbook. Four questions yielded correct response rates that were greater than one standard deviation (.248) above the mean (.581). Notably, all three metaphor-based questions were among these (Table 1, entries 7, 9, and 20). This finding strongly suggests a value to evocative metaphors for enhancing learning outcomes. Furthermore, the fact that two of these metaphors were introduced by student-authors and were then preserved by numerous subsequent generations of student editors suggests that flipped textbooks may be a valuable tool for encouraging the creation of pedagogically valuable metaphors. When the question was related to a topic described by a preserved metaphor but not to the specific principle illustrated by the metaphor (Table 1, entries 5 and 13), the rate of correct answers was within one standard deviation of the mean. This may suggest that student learning gains from preserved metaphors are limited in scope to the specific principle illustrated by the metaphor. Efforts to elucidate whether similar pedagogical value can be found for other forms of preserved creative language (cultural references, anthropomorphisms, etc.) are ongoing. 139 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

Table 1. List of Exam Questions, Their Associated Wiki Chapter(s), Origin of the Metaphor the Question Was Based on (if Applicable), Number Correct, and Rate Correct

a

Correct (n=24)

Rate Correcta

1

13

0.54

2

9,10,11

11

0.46

3

13

9

0.38

4

15

23

0.96

5

16

13

0.54

6

17

8

0.33

7

19

24

1.00

8

2

16

0.67

9

4,7,22

20

0.83

10

21,23,24

17

0.71

11

6,17,22, 27

7

0.29

12

3

5

0.21

13

31

16

0.67

14

32

8

0.33

15

33

18

0.75

16

4

18

0.75

17

5

4

0.17

18

7

17

0.71

19

9

11

0.46

20

9

21

0.88

Mean

13.95

0.581

SD

5.94

0.248

Question #

Chapter(s)

1

Metaphor Source

Related

Student

Instructor

Related

Student

Bolded and italicized rates are more than one standard deviation above the mean.

Conclusion and Future Directions We have demonstrated that students are capable of producing a “flipped” textbook to accompany a course that their future classmates find valuable as a learning tool to enhance their own course experiences. Because the wiki platform on which this flipped textbook is based upon is WYSIWYG, searchable, allows inclusion of complex diagrams, and possesses a robust history feature that records all edits made, it could be adapted to suit the needs of any intermediate or advanced chemistry course. 140 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

Furthermore, we have demonstrated that our bio-organic wiki platform provides a forum for students to describe scientific phenomena using creative language that may lead to enhanced learning outcomes for future students. Based on these initial results, we next plan to ascertain how the assigned role of the student (author, editor, curator, consumer) affects how well these improved learning outcomes are achieved and whether other forms of creative language engender similar learning outcome gains. Do encouraging words or other peer-directed language forms support learning, perhaps by focusing the reader’s attention to specific topics? Are anthropomorphisms as effective as metaphors? Do students authorized with editing privileges derive greater benefits from their interactions with the flipped textbook than those who use the resource only as a textbook? The wiki platform for flipped textbook creation described herein provides an ideal laboratory to investigate these questions. In turn, the answers may help us design better flipped technologies and assignments that encourage and preserve the creative language forms that best support improved learning outcomes.

Acknowledgments The authors thank the Associated Colleges of the South and Furman University for funding. We acknowledge undergraduate research assistants Jack Miller and Jasmine Bui for their contributions to this research and to colleagues Greg Springsteen and Mike Winiski for valuable initial contributions to this project.

References 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

For a compete description of these two courses, see: Goess, B. C. J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91, 1169–1173. AAMC-HHMI Committee Report (2009) Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians. https://www.aamc.org/download/271072/data/scientific foundationsforfuturephysicians.pdf (accessed June 2017). We anticipate this situation will be remedied in the near future. A prominent existing text is: McMurry, J. E. Organic Chemistry: With Biological Applications, 3rd ed.; Cengage: Boston, MA, 2014. For a review, see: Hamer, J.; Purchase, H. C.; Luxton-Reilly, A.; Sheard, J. Proceedings of the 2010 ITiCSE Working Group Reports; Ankara, Turkey, June 29–30, 2010; ACM Press: New York, 2010; pp 1–14. Wikipedia. https://www.wikipedia.org (accessed June 2017) To the best of our knowledge, this flipped textbook is unprecedented. However, flipped classrooms, where content is delivered outside of the classroom and class time is reserved for collaborative student learning, are becoming increasingly common. For a review of recent research on flipped classrooms, see: Zainuddin, Z.; Halili, S. H. Int. Rev. Res. Open Dist. Learn. 2016, 17, 313–340. PBworks, Inc. www.pbworks.com (accessed June 2017). 141 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

8. 9.

10.

Downloaded by UNIV OF FLORIDA on November 15, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1261.ch010

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

Atlassian Confluence. https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence (accessed June 2017). Sample chapters from the flipped textbook can be found here: https://confluence.furman.edu:8443/display/FurmanStudentCreatedBio OrganicElectronicTextSample/Home (accessed June 2017). Note that an appropriate ChemDraw plug-in must be installed to view many of the diagrams. Peer review is becoming an increasingly utilized strategy for improving student science writing skills. See: Walker, J. P.; Sampson, V. J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 1269–1274. See also: Zwicky, D. A.; Hands, M. D. J. Chem. Educ. 2016, 93, 477–481. Because videos could not be conveniently edited by subsequent students in the course, the instructors did review these videos in advance and avoided posting those with unhelpful content. This has largely proven true, though we have not yet rigorously analyzed the flipped textbook to determine how the error rate has changed over time, nor have we yet implemented any form of expert review or analysis. Tartaro, A.; Goess, B.C.; Winiski, M. Creative Language in a Studentgenerated Bioorganic Chemistry Wiki Textbook. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition; Glasgow, UK, June 22–25, 2015; ACM Press: New York, 2015; pp 221–224. Tartaro, A.; Goess, B. C.; Miller, J.; Bui, J. Learning Outcomes from a Student-generated “Flipped” Wiki Textbook. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work; Sanibel Island, FL, November 13–16, 2016; ACM Press: New York, 2016; pp 449–452.

142 Sörensen and Canelas; Online Approaches to Chemical Education ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.