Practices in Action
How to Use This Resource
A frequent misunderstanding is that flipping means recording lectures. Video is one option, but it is often not the best fit. An instructor can build narrated slides, screencasts, or podcasts, or reuse existing readings, websites, and videos. What unifies a flipped course is the move it makes possible: arriving prepared so class time can be spent on application. The medium of the pre-class material matters less than that move. The examples below show that move taking different shapes across disciplines, and a final example shows how it translates to a fully asynchronous online course.
Examples by Discipline
ANATOMY
Video Plus Accountability
As part of her Faculty Scholars project at Northeastern, Dr. Leslie Day flipped her Gross Anatomy course. Anatomy is content-dense, and the traditional approach asked students to absorb large volumes of terminology and structure during lecture, then make sense of it alone. Day moved that foundational content to before-class resources and used class time for the harder work: locating structures, reasoning through relationships, and applying anatomical knowledge to clinical scenarios with her there to guide them. The pre-class videos do their job only because students arrive accountable for the content. That accountability frees the meeting for application rather than recap.
Listen to Dr. Day discuss her flipped classroom in this video:
PHILOSOPHY OR LITERATURE
Reading with Social Annotation
A humanities seminar usually has no lecture to record at all. Here the pre-class material is the text itself, and the flip lives in how students engage it beforehand. Instead of simply assigning a chapter, the instructor asks students to annotate it together in a shared digital tool, such as Perusall, marking passages they find compelling, confusing, or contestable. Students arrive having already surfaced the interpretive tensions, so class time goes to argument and close reading rather than to establishing what the text said.
STATISTICS OR ENGINEERING
Worked Examples and Pre-Class Problems
In quantitative fields, the pre-class material can be a set of worked examples paired with a few low-stakes problems. Students attempt the routine cases on their own and bring their stumbling points to class. The instructor then devotes the meeting to messier, open-ended problems, the kind where students benefit most from real-time coaching and from comparing approaches with peers. The accountability piece, the submitted attempt, doubles as a diagnostic, showing the instructor exactly where to aim the session.
INTRODUCTORY SCIENCE
A Podcast or a Guided Reading
Pre-class content need not even be visual. A podcast students can absorb while commuting, or a reading scaffolded by a short set of guiding questions, can prepare them just as well as video, sometimes better, when the content is more conceptual than procedural. The choice of medium should follow the content and your students’ realities rather than a fixed formula.
STUDIO, LAB, AND PERFORMANCE COURSES
Demonstration Before Practice
In hands-on disciplines, the flip can move the demonstration out of class. Students review a technique, such as a lab procedure, a design method, or a musical passage, through a short recording or annotated walkthrough before arriving. Class time then becomes studio or bench time: doing the work while the instructor circulates, observes, and coaches at the moment of difficulty. This is the flip in its most literal sense, turning class into the place where students practice rather than watch.
FULLY ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE COURSES
Flipping Without a Shared Classroom
The flip is sometimes assumed to require a synchronous meeting, but the underlying logic transfers cleanly to asynchronous online courses. The key is to recognize that “in-class application” is really facilitated, collaborative application. That can happen asynchronously.
Consider an asynchronous online course module. The “pre-class” layer is the same as in any flip: a short reading, recorded segment, or interactive tutorial, with a brief check for understanding so students engage it before moving on. The “in-class” layer, the part that would otherwise be solo homework, becomes structured, social, and supported. Rather than asking students to apply the concept alone, the instructor builds an application task that requires interaction: a discussion board where students post a solution and then critique two peers’ approaches, a collaborative document where a small group works a case together over several days, or a peer-feedback cycle on a draft. The instructor stays present in that space, reading posts, redirecting misconceptions, and weighing in where coaching is needed. This is the same facilitating role the instructor would play in a room, just distributed across time.
The design discipline is what’s key. Because students gain more when checks are built in and when the active component is not thinned out (van Alten et al., 2019), an asynchronous flip should keep the application task substantial rather than letting it collapse back into more solo content consumption. The risk in online courses is that everything quietly becomes “pre-class” material and nothing becomes the supported, collaborative application that drives the model’s benefit. Guard the application layer, and the flip holds, even without a shared classroom.
For more on designing these supported online experiences, see CATLR’s resources on hybrid course design.