So, with the help of Echo360, he devised a flipped model for the classroom.

In 2012, that flipped model looked like this:

At home, before class, students watched brief lecture modules, which introduced them to the day’s content. They also read a textbook — the same, introductory-level book as in 2011 — before they arrived.

When they got to class, Mumper would begin by asking them “audience response” questions. He’d put a multiple-choice question about the previous night’s lectures on a PowerPoint slide and ask all the students to respond via small, cheap clickers. He’d then look at their response, live, as they answered, and address any inconsistencies or incorrect beliefs revealed. Maybe 50 percent of the class got the wrong answer to one of these questions: This gave him an opportunity to lecture just enough so that students could understand what they got wrong.

Then, the class would split up into pairs, and Mumper would ask them a question which required them to apply the previous night’s content, such as: “Given your knowledge of the skin and transdermal delivery, describe how you might treat this patient who had breakthrough cancer pain.” The pairs would discuss an answer, then share their findings with the class. At the end of that section, Mumper would go over any points relevant to the question which he felt the class failed to bring up.

In 2012, in class’s final section, a team of students would give a 10 minute presentation to the rest of the class based on the previous night’s reading, then lead a discussion about it. Mumper would then conduct a quiz.

Student presentations were students’s least favorite part of the class, and in 2013 they was replaced. In 2013, too, Mumper removed the introductory reading and replaced it with a “carefully selected” clincal study about the day’s topic. Instead of presenting (or taking a quiz, which was relegated to after-class online work), students read a clinical study and discussed it together and then as a class.

Then, they’d go home, watch the lecture-modules, do some reading, come back in and do it all again.

“To be honest, upfront, there was a lot of, I don’t know, I guess a little bit of complaining,” Natalie Young, the Pharm.D. student, told me, “because we just were used to just going to class and not having to do so much preparation for the class.”

“And with this,” she said, “you actually have to do reading or watch the [lecture modules], you actually have to prepare for the class.”

She added, too, that Mumper’s course succeeded because of how well he implemented the technology and flipped structure. “In terms of execution, I’ve had professors who were kinda committed to this way of teaching, and so they would halfway do it.”

“So it was kind of awkward,” she said. “You’d sit there and you’d have the first hour or 45 minutes of lecture, then they’d want you to get into small groups, and they couldn’t figure how they wanted the groups. In some classes, it didn’t work so well, because the professor didn’t have a set structure that they wanted to follow and stick to.”