A new educational resource to improve veterinary students' animal welfare learning experience

ANIPHI: An innovative pedagogical platform based on the Delphi method to support animal welfare teaching

As a teaching subject, animal welfare is challenging for educators and learners, as was recently shown in a recent survey on the evolution of animal welfare teaching in Europe. Among several suggestions to overcome the current resistance to implementing animal welfare education, we highlight two. The first is that animal welfare education should be based on learner-centred approaches; the second is that it should encompass both animal welfare science and ethics and law. To the best of our knowledge, there are no learner-centred pedagogical approaches that can simultaneously explore scientific and ethical concepts. Furthermore, when exploring ethical concepts within the educational context, there is the additional challenge of being able to depart from discussion and debate to a systematic organization of knowledge. Our work simultaneously addresses these two challenges, presenting the design and implementation of a novel web-based learner-centred pedagogical platform for farm animal welfare teaching. The platform, named ANIPHI, uses the Delphi method’s iterative nature as a learning process to generate both reflection and (online) debate among learners. ANIPHI can be used by educators in an online environment, in a classroom environment, or in a combination of the two environments. ANIPHI was developed within the ERASMUS+ ANICARE project and is an open web-based platform for all educators interested in teaching farm animal welfare. Given ANIPHI’s flexible and user-friendly nature, the platform simultaneously exposes learners to ethical and scientific concepts in different educational realities, according to the educator’s objectives. Furthermore, videos depicting different husbandry practices across different types of animal production and countries are embedded in the platform. These videos are commented on by the farmer himself and by animal scientists, which enriches the learner’s experience. Educators across the ANICARE consortium have already successfully tested the ANIPHI platform for different farm animal welfare topics. We conclude this article by presenting one example of using ANIPHI in a real-life educational context, where we discuss some aspects of the design and use of our pedagogical platform.

Agreement between veterinary students and anesthesiologists regarding postoperative pain assessment in dogs

OBJECTIVE

To determine the levels of agreement among first- and second-year veterinary students and experienced anesthesiologists in assessing postoperative pain in dogs from video-recordings.

STUDY DESIGN

Cross-sectional study.

SUBJECTS

Twenty-seven veterinary students, five anesthesiologists and 13 canine clinical patients.

METHODS

Prior to their enrolment in a core anesthesia course, veterinary students volunteered to watch 13 90 second videos of dogs. Dogs were hospitalized in an intensive care unit after a variety of surgical procedures. Students were asked to score the level of the dogs' pain using the Dynamic Interactive Visual Analog Scale and the Short Form of the Glasgow Composite-Measure Pain Scale. The same videotapes were scored by five board-certified anesthesiologists. The differences and agreement between the ratings of anesthesiologists and students, and first- and second-year students were determined with Mann-Whitney U-tests and Fleiss' or Cohen's kappa, respectively.

RESULTS

Pain scores assigned by students and anesthesiologists differed significantly (p < 0.01). Students assigned higher pain scores to dogs that were given low pain scores by anesthesiologists, and lower pain scores to dogs deemed to be in more pain by anesthesiologists. On average, students assigned higher scores on both scales.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE

Veterinary students early in their training assigned pain scores to dogs that differed from scores assigned by experienced anesthesiologists.

Instruction and Curriculum in Veterinary Medical Education: A 50-Year Perspective

Our knowledge of veterinary medicine has expanded greatly over the past 50 years. To keep pace with these changes and produce competent professionals ready to meet evolving societal needs, instruction within veterinary medical curricula has undergone a parallel evolution. The curriculum of 1966 has given way, shifting away from lecture-laboratory model with few visual aids to a program of active learning, significant increases in case- or problem-based activities, and applications of technology, including computers, that were unimaginable 50 years ago. Curricula in veterinary colleges no longer keep all students in lockstep or limit clinical experiences to the fourth year, and instead have moved towards core electives with clinical activities provided from year 1. Provided here are examples of change within veterinary medical education that, in the view of the authors, had positive impacts on the evolution of instruction and curriculum. These improvements in both how and what we teach are now being made at a more rapid pace than at any other time in history and are based on the work of many faculty and administrators over the past 50 years.