This author interview is by Larry Hurtubise, of Ohio University. Dr Hurtubise's full paper, ‘The Flipped Classroom in Medical Education: Engaging Students to Build Competency', is available for download in Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development.

Please summarise for readers the content of your article.
The article proposes the use of the flipped classroom model to enable learners to master entrustable professional activities. It provides a theoretical grounding and describes the application of a backward design process to the development of flipped classroom. There is also a discussion of the change management required to flip the classroom and example extending team based learning to an interprofessional audience.

How did you come to be involved in your area of study?
I have been an educational technologist for 15 years and have supported medical educators in the creation of videos and e-learning modules in support of a flipped curriculum. My first exposure to the flipped classroom was in 2000 at a Technology Enhanced Learning and Research conference at The Ohio State University. A couple of years later I was consulting on a project to create an online final exam in an Optometry Lab course. I suggested creating a low stakes quiz to make sure the technology worked before the final. The instructor created a quiz over some basic material. After the quiz she reported that because the students understood the basic concepts they had moved more quickly through the lab content and were asking a noticeably higher order of questions than in previous years and I realized we had flipped her lab. While at The Ohio State University I was also a part of a group that encouraged medical education research. My role was to mentor faculty whose scholarly projects were related to educational technology. We also provided faculty development in a variety of medical education topics including curriculum development, instructional design, assessment, and the effective use of educational technology.

What was previously known about the topic of your article?
Much of the literature related to the flipped classroom describes its efficacy. Additionally, many educational leaders like Charles Prober and Salman Khan have written compelling pieces calling for educators to rethink their teaching and extolling the benefits of the flipped classroom. There were also many how-to pieces describing best practices for everything related to the flipped classroom.

How has your work in this area advanced understanding of the topic?
We tried to link the development of flipped classroom with some emerging trends in medical education and existing resources. Using a backward design model as a frame work we start with a description of the learning goal of medical education as competence not merely engaging students or reducing boredom. Next we describe assessment methods and stress the value of formative assessment. We list some of the assessment methods defined in the Medbiquitous project. We chose to highlight Medbiquitous to encourage readers of the Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development to adopt the language adopted by the AAMC as they revise their curricula. We also list teaching methods listed in Medbiquitious including Team Based Learning, a flipped model which has been used in medical education since the mid-90s. We built an example starting with a TBL case we found in MedEdPortal. We choose to highlight MedEDPortal to encourage readers of the journal to leverage this source of peer reviewed teaching materials and also to submit their projects.

What do you regard as being the most important aspect of the results reported in the article?
Personally, I feel the most significant advancement in this piece is the recognition that the flipped classroom represents a significant change in medical education. Our article recognizes the various degrees of complexity and offers practical tested recommendations for managing the change and sharing what is learned in the process.

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