About Conceptual Academy
Conceptual Academy is a content management system created and maintained by the authors of the "conceptual" line of textbooks, including Conceptual Physics, Conceptual Chemistry, Conceptual Physical Science, and Conceptual Integrated Science, both college and high school editions. This system hosts hundreds of the author's video lessons. Most students discover that these videos provide the context they need to understand the dense paragraphs of the textbook. This is to say: Conceptual Academy and the textbook make for a perfect complement. The textbook is where students can read. Conceptual Academy is where they can watch and listen. You can think of Conceptual Academy as the "talking textbook" created by the authors of the printed textbook. But there's much more . . .
An instructor provides us their schedule of classes showing what chapter sections are covered on what dates. The dates of major exams is also helpful. From this we create a customized Conceptual Academy course through which students navigate to our resources by the calendar dates of the instructor's schedule. In addition to our library of videos, these resources include automated quizzes, a grade book that tracks points collected through these quizzes, study advice, worksheets, PhET simulations, chapter summaries, and practice exams. This customized course is presented to students as a project through which they are to collect a given number of points. The more students stay on task throughout the semester, the more points they earn. At the end of the semester, the instructor uploads Conceptual Academy scores to an LMS as a single assignment worth from 5% to 20% of a student's overall course grade. Their Conceptual Academy score ends up being a quantitative measure of student attitude, which is particularly useful for large-enrollment classes.
An underlying goal of Conceptual Academy is to provide the support an instructor may need to implement the “flipped classroom” model. Within this model, students are introduced to academic content before coming to class so that they are ready to apply this content during class through an assortment of student-centered learning activities as are described in our Conceptual Academy Handbook of Class Activities.
Conceptual Academy is an ultimate resource for online classes too!
Faculty, please visit our instructor support site to learn more: ConceptualScience.com.