Flipped learning with Jupyter: Experiences, best practices, and supporting research

Description

Jupyter has exploded in popularity, in not only data science but also education. As seen in the Gallery of Interesting Jupyter Notebooks, myriad notebooks are shared with the purpose of teaching some topic or technique. Used within a formal course, Jupyter combined with a pedagogical practice called “flipped learning” can lead to engaging and highly effective learning experiences.

In flipped learning, students encounter new course material before class meetings through structured activities, rather than during class via passive lecturing. This helps students learn how to learn on their own, and it frees up class time to focus on creative applications of the basic material. Typically, students in flipped learning environments encounter new material by watching lectures that are recorded and posted online. However, recent research has suggested that a more effective practice is to have students interact with a “tangible interface” that gives them hands-on experience with those new concepts.

Lorena Barba and Robert Talbert offer an overview of flipped learning and the research that supports its effectiveness, discuss the use of Jupyter notebooks as a “tangible interface” for new material in a flipped course, and share case studies from their own courses in which Jupyter was used to build an active, engaging, and academically effective flipped learning environment. Along the way, they detail design principles that leverage the best features of Jupyter to produce a high-functioning active learning environment and explore the role of Jupyter-based course materials in the rapidly expanding world of open educational resources (OER).