CC BY B. de los Arcos

CC BY B. de los Arcos

I’m in Mars, Pennsylvania Route 228, population 1,699. Most notable Martian? A certain Gino Crognale, of renown in the make-up world for his artistry in The Walking Dead. FlipCon14, the 7th Annual Flipped Learning Conference, is about to start and it’s not zombies descending on these 0.5 square miles of Butler County, but hordes of teachers with one thing on their minds: the flip!

This year conference organisers have divided presentations into different strands, so it’ll be difficult to come away not having found what you travelled here for, whether you are an experienced flipped educator, new to flipped learning, a sponsor showcasing your products or, like me, a humble researcher in the land of the free.  Apart from plenaries and plenty of opportunities for networking, there are in total six slots of concurrent sessions where on site attendees will have to choose from up to twelve different talks each. My interest will stay with the research strand during the two days, so here’s what I’m looking forward to:

Katherine McKnight, Principal Director of Research for the Center for Educator Learning and Effectiveness at Pearson, and Jessica Yarbro, George Mason University will review research on teaching and learning with video.

Irma Brasseur-Hock and Meghan Arthur, University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, will share the research findings of a project involving a survey of 142 members of the Flipped Learning Network and focus groups interviews. What was exactly their research question? I’m eager to find out.

Kari Arfstrom and Taylor Pettis will compare the results from the most recent survey of flipped educators to that of two years ago in terms of the who, what, why, where and when of flipped learning.

Chris Luker, Chemistry Teacher from Highland Local Schools, will chair a round-table discussion with the aim of “collaboratively organizing research ideas that will continue to support the flipped learning model”. Ah, the need for research! Can’t beat it.

And Lucy Kulbago, John Carroll University, will examine student attitudes toward science and conceptual gains in a flipped undergraduate introductory physics course for life science majors.

There is plenty to tempt me away from this my initial choice, but I shall hope to stick to my guns and feed back in a couple of days.

Now where are those zomb… I mean flipped educators?