Dive Brief:

• As video lectures in flipped classroom settings become more commonplace, they raise the question of whether in-classroom professors should be sidekicks to video-lecture star professors.
• One such situation is at Brigham Young University, where Norman Nemrow, a retired accounting professor, still has his renowned video lectures headlining introductory accounting classes while another professor handles the live-classroom teaching, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
• When teaching a class with a video professor, the live professor has to be able to keep his or her ego in check while bridging in-class teaching to the video professor’s material.

Dive Insight:

Do the advantages of having a celebrity lecturer who can excite and connect with the student audience outweigh the downsides? Some professors using the flipped classroom model with a separate video lecturer report that their students seem less likely to bond with them, and less likely to approach them during office hours for discussions or to ask questions. Nemrow has become somewhat of a legend at BYU, and his video persona is known as Video Norm. He started recording his video lectures nearly 15 years ago.