One of the teaching concepts we discussed at the Lean Launchpad Educators Program at Stanford last week was the ‘flipped’ classroom.
Instead of using the class time to give a lecture, the lectures are pre-recorded on video and the students required to watch them before coming to class. The class time is then an interactive discussion about the topic. In this program the students are also asked to go out and talk to real potential customers in between class. The teams report on these experiences to the class each week and get feedback and mentoring.
This concept makes a lot of sense. It makes me wonder why some conferences still have a person stand up at the front of the conference and ‘lecture’ on a topic. If the lecturer pre-recorded a video of the lecture, the time at the conference could be use for a much deeper interactive discussion on the topic. Before the Internet was invented, you had to travel a long way to seek out the knowledge, but since it is now at our fingertips, this conference model is out of date.
One more crazy thought… What if there was a seminar that set aside a morning to discuss a particular action for your business? Instead of talking about it for the morning, what if when you got there you were sent right back out to act on this topic? It might be customer development, employee actions or building a system. Then everyone at the seminar would gather back for lunch and talk about how the morning went.
Would attend this type of morning seminar?
