A New Year for the FLN

New Year’s Plans for 2017

Happy New Year. I’m Ken Bauer and I’m the chair of the board of the Flipped Learning Network (FLN) and have been since July 18, 2016. I’ve been working mainly behind the scenes during the last months of 2016 to help transition the FLN to be a more community focused organization.

The first and most visible change was our move to this current website that allows posting by all of our community (and that includes you the reader).  I would like to take this moment to reflect on the past year and give some insight into what we have planned for the year ahead.

We are launching a few important initiatives from the FLN and welcome your feedback. Please contact me directly via email (ken at flippedlearning dot com) or via Twitter in a tweet or direct message (I have my account configured for direct messages from anyone) and you can find me on Twitter at @ken_bauer

Thanks to Brian

The Flipped Learning Network has a rich but fairly short history and includes many pioneers that started the network. In future posts, I would like to shine a spotlight on the founders and volunteers but for now I would like to give special thanks to Brian Bennett who guided the FLN in 2015 and 2016.

“Hello #ds106!” flickr photo by bennettscience https://flickr.com/photos/bennettscience/8757561209 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Brian is well known in our community and you should follow his writings on his blog “Nodes: Exploring the intersections of learning and technology” and on Twitter (@bennettscience).  I have much to be thankful for to Brian who has introduced me to a wonderful community here at the FLN by inviting me to be on the advisory council and later to the FLN board and supporting my decision to attempt to fill his shoes when he decided to step down as chair of the FLN.  So thanks Brian, you are a valuable member of our community and I know you will continue to contribute.

Coming This Year

Please join us in discussions here in the comments or join us in our Slack community or with a post on our Facebook page or via Twitter at @flippedlearning.  At the time of this writing (and viewing in a computer web browser) there is a yellow bar at the top of the site highlighting ways to participate in *our* community (remember: that includes you the reader).

Plans for this year include:

• A drive to generate some form of revenue to support the low costs of the FLN. We are a non-profit and in the past our revenue stream was mostly driven by an annual conference. We chose to no longer run FlipCon conferences in our role as the FLN but we may help organize local, national and international conferences in the future. For now we are looking at any options to “keep the lights on” and that includes possible advertising, sponsorship and ideas from you the community.  If you are part of an organization that can help fund the FLN, please contact us.
• Courses short and long. I (Ken) have run a short (free, open and online) course introducing the four pillars of flipped learning since 2014. We will be launching two versions of that course (one in English, one in Spanish) that will run approximately six weeks. There will be no charge but we are considering a way to give official certificates/badges for a small fee. Ideas welcome again and expect two posts on the site later this week to announce those courses. This year we will host the course under the FLN flag and site but you can see the previous instances over at http://theopenflip.com
• Troy Cockrum and Joan Brown produced over one hundred episodes of the Flipped Learning Podcast which was the official podcast of the Flipped Learning Network. They continue their great work podcasting under a new remixed name over at Flipped Learning Remixed.
  You should definitely subscribe to that podcast but we would like you to know that we are preparing the first episode of a new podcast from the FLN titled “Ask the Flipped Learning Network”. More details in another blog post soon but the idea is to solicit questions from the community for the community and have them answered by the community. If you would like to help, please contact us and/or join the #flipclasspodcast channel in our Slack server.
• Helaine Marshall, our secretary and treasurer of the FLN board is working on a quarterly newsletter for the FLN. Look for news soon about this and contact Helaine if you are interested in contributing to that project.
• Spotlight video, audio and/or written interviews of active members of the Flipped Learning Network. Kelly Walsh produced our first episode with an interview with Matthew Moore, go check that one out! Our board members Crystal Kirch and Kate Baker will be working with others to produce more.
  If you would like to help with this or have a suggestion for a spotlighted community member, please contact us.
• A book reading club! Katie Lanier will be leading our first reading together. We haven’t figured out the details on how we are going to pull this together but we have chosen a great first book “The Innovator’s Mindset” by George Couros. We should be kicking this off in February.

Feedback

What else would you like to see from OUR community? Please help us serve this great community with your feedback and contribution.

– Ken Bauer, Chair of the Board of the Flipped Learning Network (and a crazy flipping teacher)