The Challenges of Teaching Anatomy and Physiology Laboratory Online in the Time of COVID-19

Faculty Perception of Student Engagement in Online Anatomy Laboratory Courses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

When the social distancing guidelines, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused universities to close campuses, there was a rapid shift in the course delivery methods of human gross anatomy laboratory sessions. Courses were delivered online, and this change created new challenges for anatomy faculty to engage students effectively. This profoundly impacted student-instructor interactions, the quality of the learning environment, and successful student outcomes. Because of the importance of student interaction and engagement for hands-on laboratory courses like anatomy, which rely on cadaver dissections and in-person learning communities, as well as the novel opportunity, this qualitative study sought to explore the faculty perspectives of transitioning their in-person laboratory sessions online and unearth their experience with student engagement in this new teaching format. The Delphi technique was used to explore this experience in two rounds of qualitative inquiry using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, and thematic analysis was used to analyze the data, identifying codes and building themes. The study utilized indicators of student engagement in online courses to formulate four themes: instructor presence, social presence, cognitive presence, and reliable technology design and access. These were constructed based on the factors faculty used to maintain engagement, new challenges they faced, and strategies deployed to overcome these challenges and engage students in the new learning format. These are supported by strategies such as using video and multimedia, ice-breaker activities, chat and discussion features, immediate and personalized feedback, and virtual meeting via synchronous sessions. These themes highlight important lessons that faculty designing online anatomy laboratory courses can use to guide their course design, and institutions and instructional design faculty can use to inform best practices and faculty development efforts. Additionally, the study calls for further research to design a standardized and global assessment tool that measures student engagement in the online learning environment.

Impact of COVID-19 on access to laboratories and human participants: exercise science faculty perspectives

Restrictions due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic impacted the ability of faculty and students in exercise science to work in lab settings with human participants. The purpose of this study was to determine how exercise science faculty were impacted by COVID-19 restrictions with respect to access and use of exercise science lab and research facilities. Of the 100 surveyed participants categorized as requiring access to people and lab spaces (lab-based faculty), 61% (n = 61) reported decreased research productivity with 87% (n = 53) of those faculty in one or more of the following subdisciplines: exercise physiology, clinical exercise physiology, or biomechanics. Of all lab-based faculty, 40% (n = 40) participants reported having access to students and lab spaces and 55% (n = 55) indicated they were allowed to conduct in-person research. Of tenure-track lab-based faculty, 80% (n = 20) reported a decrease in research productivity, of which 60.0% (n = 12) identified as female. Among faculty with 5 or less years of teaching experience (n = 23), 69.6% (n = 16) reported a decrease in productivity, with 68.8% (n = 11) of those being female. All exercise science faculty surveyed reported issues with safety and social distancing, modified lab and research procedures, faculty workload, and research productivity. This information can be leveraged to create better infrastructure to support faculty and develop and implement strategies to reduce workload inequities.

All-digital training course in neurophysiology: lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic

BACKGROUND

The social distancing and suspension of on-campus learning, imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, are likely to influence medical training for months if not years. Thus, there is a need for digital replacement for classroom teaching, especially for hands-on courses, during which social distancing is hardly possible. Here, we investigated students' learning experience with a newly designed digital training course in neurophysiology, with intercalated teaching blocks in either asynchronous (unsupervised online lectures and e-labs) or synchronous (online seminars, supervised by instructors) formats.

METHODS

The accompanying anonymized prospective study included 146 student participants. At the beginning and the end of the course, students were invited to answer anonymous online questionnaires with 18 and 25 items, respectively. We conducted both qualitative analyses of students' survey responses and statistical analyses of the results of cohort-specific summative examinations. The summative assessment results were compared both between 4 current cohorts and with the respective historical cohorts.

RESULTS

Despite having little prior experience with e-learning (4.5 on the 1-7 scale), students adapted remarkably well to this online format. They appreciated its higher flexibility, time efficiency, student-oriented nature (especially when using inverted classroom settings), tolerance towards the individual learning style and family circumstances, and valued the ability to work through lectures and e-labs at their own learning speed. The major complaints concerned diminished social contacts with instructors and fellow students, the inability to ask questions as they occur, and the lack of sufficient technical expertise. The students valued the newly developed e-labs, especially the implementation of interactive preparative measures (PreLabs) and the intuitive lab design offered by the chosen software (Lt Platform from AD Instruments). The summative examinations at the end of the course documented the quality of knowledge transfer, which was comparable to that of previous classically instructed cohorts.

CONCLUSION

Despite the missing personal contact between the faculty and the students, inherent to online teaching, the all-digital training course described here proofed to be of good educational value and, in case the pandemic continues, is worse considering for the future. Some of the described building blocks, like digital lectures or interactive PreLabs, may survive the pandemics to enrich the medical education toolbox in the future.

Sharing a Preliminary Experience of an Effective Online Teaching Strategy for Physiology Practicals

To counter the challenge posed by the suspension of face-to-face classes due to COVID-19 imposed restrictions, a plan was formulated to conduct practical physiology classes for first-year undergraduate medical students at a newly established medical college in India. The students were provided with study materials before the scheduled class along with an assignment based on it. The class was taken on an online platform, with live practical demonstration on a full-body mannequin. This was followed by discussion in small groups. This strategy actively engaged both teachers and students and provided an effective model for imparting practical skills on an online platform.

Increasing Engagement during Online Learning through the Use of Interactive Slides

It is difficult in asynchronous online instruction to keep students engaged and motivated. The rapid and unexpected nature of the move to online instruction has meant that the content presented to students has been primarily static and linear. Thus, there is a need for creative pedagogical approaches that re-create some level of the laboratory experience. One economical and accessible approach to building an interactive lab experience is making web-based interactive slides. In the virtual spaces created by this approach, students can explore different modalities of content in a nonlinear and asynchronous manner. We hope that this approach will make the learning process easier and more enjoyable for students while simultaneously making the complex content normally covered in microbiology labs more approachable. In this article we provide detailed instructions for producing web-based interactive slides as well as an example interactive slide that encompasses content that might normally be presented in an introductory microbiology class.