Brandon Cline, John "Nutie" and Edie Dowdle Professor of Finance at Mississippi State University, has taught financial management for 25 years. Despite technological evolution and changes in student learning, teaching methods remained largely unchanged.
In 2024, Professor Cline transformed his approach by flipping the classroom using the Blended Teaching platform. We sat down with him to learn what worked well and what advice he has for instructors exploring flipped learning.
Things have changed significantly over my teaching career. The biggest change is in the philosophy of students: how they learn and what motivates them.
I first started teaching Financial Management in 2001. At that time, everything was textbook-based. A & B students were mostly self-driven, and my job as a professor was to guide, encourage, and prevent obstacles. Decreasing self-motivation over time has made it harder to get students to work through the material independently.
The number of students reading the textbook before class has dropped to effectively zero! Even A & B students no longer read the book on a regular basis. This suggests that philosophically, students today process information differently than they did 25 years ago.
Year after year, I became more frustrated because I had to teach basic concepts that students could have easily gotten out of the textbook.
If students don’t come to class prepared, I must spend all of our class time covering the fundamentals. That means we don’t have time to cover the things that matter the most, or the things that will be most interesting to them. If we only have time to cover the basics, I’m not able to dig into the things that will fire them up and keep them engaged throughout the semester.
That issue perpetuates. If I don’t have time to get past the basics, I’m unable to create that momentum, and it’s harder to help students understand how everything connects to the bigger picture.
What Higher Education needs is a way to incentivize students to work through the fundamentals of the material before they come into the classroom to create opportunities to go beyond the basics while I am in front of them.
If I'm discussing basic terms and definitions, the typical student thinks, "Why do I need the professor? I could do this on my own!" The irony is that they could in fact do that on their own, but they're not independently doing the work before class.
In that environment, the instructor's value is diminished. Anyone without a Finance major can read definitions and understand a balance sheet, but our experience equips us to do the important things: contextualizing learnings within a bigger picture, connecting dots, and deepening understanding.
Honestly, it has gotten harder to provide that value, especially in Financial Management, where only ~15-20% of students are Finance Majors. For non-majors, you must clearly illustrate how what they are learning will benefit their lives and careers.
There's also the connection of ideas—those lightbulb moments when students see how one lesson applies to the next and how that fits into the broader picture. When you create these moments, the student experience improves and your evaluations improve, because students believe that you are in fact providing more value in the classroom.
It's important to understand how student psychology has changed and redesign resources and classes to work for today's students.
Students learn differently now. Typically, a student now attends class to determine what's important, then the best students go away and study those topics. This gives them more control over their time and learning, but diminishes our ability to provide added value. By incentivizing pre-class work, we can more effectively deliver that additional value, and students respond positively.
Our value as professors is providing the right incentives, guidance, and motivation for students. If we create the right environment for students to work independently before class, they spend more time and effort on the course. When done right, students walk away with a better experience and gain more knowledge. This ultimately reflects in course evaluations.
Since shifting to a flipped-class approach, many students have told me, "I really appreciate you incentivizing us to look at the material beforehand!"
What works well in my face-to-face classes is assigning the Blended Teaching video chapters, along with a simple quiz, before our scheduled meetings. I set the due date to 11:59 pm the night before and make the quizzes difficult enough that students must watch the videos to do well.
The video chapters are high-quality and engaging, making them much more captivating than reading a textbook chapter. This makes pre-class work less painful for students.
The participation level has shocked me! Almost all students take the quiz, and around 75% genuinely watch the videos.
This has transformed my classroom dynamics. Students come to class having just seen the material. They've completed the quiz, heard discussions, and written down questions to ask in class.
I planned to use this like a regular textbook, but I quickly realized that students were engaging with the material much more than I expected, which resulted in an immediate change in my approach.
The first time I used Blended Teaching, I walked in with my PowerPoint slides and started by opening a discussion. To my surprise, a student in the third row raised her hand with a question. I answered, and then a student in the back raised his hand with another question. A third student chimed in, and suddenly we were in the middle of a discussion.
Thirty minutes in, I hadn't gone through a single slide. I covered everything on my slides, and they never realized I was lecturing. I've turned off PowerPoint and haven't used it in the classroom since that day.
Before this approach, I'd be lucky to have two students participating per session. With the video-based approach, I consistently have 15-20 students talking and asking good questions.
After that first lecture, I had conversations with two students. The first shared that he was shocked when he got to college to find things more archaic, with most classes reverting to traditional textbooks, and that he appreciated the technology-enabled approach. The second thanked me for not using PowerPoint, saying, "You know, that's so 1995!" I replied, "Yeah, I know. I haven't used those things since last spring!"
We spend the first 20-30 minutes on average discussing the chapter. I ensure all relevant points are covered, with students doing most of the talking. Knowing that 75% of the class have watched the videos means I don't need to cover every detail as I did before. Instead, I focus on helping them connect the dots and relate the topics to the bigger picture of the course. It turns out, students very much appreciate this approach.
The next 10-15 minutes is spent discussing current issues related to the chapter. Sometimes students bring these up during the initial discussion. I emphasize that these are topics companies and markets are dealing with today, and their knowledge helps them make decisions in this environment.
We spend the final 30-45 minutes working through problems. These are detailed problems with 4-5 steps that emphasize the points discussed, and give students time with me to practice, with my support if they get stuck.
If you are interested in using Blended Teaching for your class, click the button below for instructor access to explore the materials in full and start flipping your class.
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