Thursday, March 5, 2026

Dear Faculty and Staff Colleagues,

As President Keller shared in his message to the UNT community last week, we are undertaking a broad effort to adopt a flipped classroom/hybrid learning model to ensure every UNT student has a small, high-impact class experience even in our largest courses.

This initiative is a cornerstone of our updated curriculum strategy, aimed at significantly improving first-year retention and student success. We will offer approximately 40 new flipped courses this fall and continue to grow our catalog for Spring 2027 and beyond, building on the existing work and expertise of UNT faculty. This has been a successful course model both here and at many other institutions, and we are grateful to the faculty who are helping to lead this larger, more coordinated effort at UNT. 

In a flipped classroom/hybrid learning model, multiple course sections are coalesced into a single lecture that is delivered online. The enrolled students are then divided into smaller sections, or recitations, that meet weekly to provide an environment that fosters active student engagement, problem-solving, and community-building. While our primary focus is on large introductory-level courses, students of all levels can benefit from a flipped classroom and hybrid learning. This model empowers students to take ownership of their learning while allowing them to experience the lecture portion of a course in more flexible ways — for example, on their own time, in smaller chunks, and with opportunities to pause, re-listen, and digest. Recitations offer instructors more opportunities to observe student learning, identify misconceptions and gaps in understanding, and model how to tackle new problems, scenarios, and communication. 

This faculty-led work will be supported by the Learning Ecosystem for Empowering Futures (LEEF), which is building a five-stage structure to guide instructors through the design, approval, delivery, assessment, and revision of flipped courses. This includes ongoing support for teaching teams through consultations, workshops, communities of practice, one-on-one support, discipline-specific resources, and more. 

We invite you to visit the Flipped Courses and Hybrid Learning hub for more information, including scope and flexibility, definitions, timelines, support, and frequently asked questions. You may also email Heidi Elmendorf, deputy to the president for university initiatives, with any additional questions. 

With gratitude,

Michael A. McPherson, Ph.D.
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs

Heidi Elmendorf, Ph.D.
Deputy to the President for University Initiatives