ClickView Flipped Channels: A Dedicated Space for Educators and Students

As strong advocates for video’s place in the classroom, we are excited by the rise in flipped teaching amongst a passionate and growing community of educators across Australia, and indeed worldwide. In the last few weeks this excitement has been boosted by two conferences held across the country, FlipCon Adelaide and FlipCon Gold Coast, solely dedicated to flipped education. The flipped classroom is one of the most exciting frontiers in education today. But why is this?

As Jon Bergmann said at FlipCon Gold Coast a few weeks ago, the flipped classroom is not just a technological solution. Rather, it is a pedagogical approach. The practice connects direct instruction and constructivist learning methods to help facilitate surface to deep learning. Flipped teaching is a true example of technology being led by education.

Supporting a Community of Flipped Educators

We at ClickView are passionate about fostering this practice and supporting educators. Recently we have been working directly with and gathering feedback from some of Australia’s top flipped teachers to gain a sense of where the practice is at, where it is going and how we can best work to help empower teachers in flipping their classrooms.

Just last month, we hosted Australia’s first Flipped Education Leaders’ Roundtable. Some of the nation’s most established flipped educators were in attendance to discuss high-level topics concerning the flipped classroom movement. This was a great opportunity to speak face-to-face with flipped teachers and discuss what they as educators need from a technology company such as ourselves to further their work.

As a team of developers who are passionate about video for education, we were excited to meet with the flipped teachers and unveil a first iteration of our latest release: flipped channels. Curated by our content team, a flipped channel is an educator’s personal space on ClickView where they can upload and share flipped videos publicly, not only with their students, but with anyone outside of ClickView. The built-in online tools empower flipped teachers to curate and display their educational videos exactly as they would like. Our goal with the flipped channels is to bring educators who are at the top of their game together and take the distribution of their educational content to the next level.

Our prime intention of sharing the flipped channels with these teachers prior to the official launch, was to hear their feedback. Several of the flipped teachers instantly shared their views on what the flipped channels needed in order to deepen teacher impact. We spent a couple of hours discussing our work with them, listening to their feedback, and assisting the teachers in getting their own channels setup. In turn, we have already begun implementing this feedback and as we update the feature, we really think the voice of educators should shine through in all the work we do.

ClickView’s Flipped Channels

In the ClickView Exchange, you will now find a new tab: “Featured Channels”. This showcases the channels and video content by the country’s top flipped educators, many of which attended last month’s roundtable and whose feedback led to what you see online today.

Yes – Channel videos can be viewed by anyone, even without logging into ClickView

There are a lot of built-in features to the flipped channels – but I’ll let you click through and discover them yourselves. However, there is one important benefit of the new channels that deserves the spotlight.

Ensuring that flipped teaching videos are public and easily accessible is an important step for the flipped classroom movement. The ClickView platform is supported by a strong passionate community of educators who create and upload powerful, visually-engaging videos for students. With the new channels, we have facilitated how these teachers can reach a wider audience of students and educators. Any student across the country, or even the world, can now listen and learn from some of the country’s top teachers. Students can turn to this dedicated space to find additional resources and support their learning.

And this is where ClickView comes into its own as a platform for flipped teachers, and is something we discussed at length at last month’s flipped roundtable: Unlike other video sharing platforms, ClickView is in a unique position due to its audience of dedicated educators and students. With over 2 million educators and students on the ClickView platform, there is no other space in the world where teachers can upload flipped videos and be guaranteed that their educational content will be viewed by the right audience.

Coming soon to channels…

There’s always more in the ClickView pipeline! 🙂 I shared this with the teachers at the roundtable and am happy to announce that we will soon release a suite of in-depth analytics so flipped teachers can see how much reach their videos are receiving. For example, the data will include the number of unique video views by students, along with detailed demographics such as from which country or age group.

Flipped channels are an exciting development for flipped educators across Australia and worldwide. As part of the ClickView development team, I’m proud to say that making our technology educationally driven is a core value that we work hard to implement at every stage of the development process. We thank all the flipped teachers from last month’s roundtable and from across the country who worked with us on this project.