Tag Archives: content

How do you feel about sharing with the world? The Open Educational Resources (OER) phenomenon.

Joann May Chang, PhD
Professor of Biology & Director for the Center for Instructional Excellence at Arizona Western College
Yuma, Arizona

I recently attended a training on Open Educational Resources (OER) and what it truly means to offer an OER course.  What is an OER course?  If you offer a course that uses an e-text with other content found on the web to supplement without costing the student any money, this would be defined as being free of costs and not truly an OER course.  Why? That leads to the key question Matthew Bloom, OER Coordinator for Maricopa Community Colleges, posed to our group during the training: “How do you feel about sharing with the world?” 

OER has become a prominent topic in higher education to save students on textbook costs, but also a movement in building high quality accessible teaching materials for educators without being tied to a publishing company.  In a 2017 blog post by Chris Zook, he provided infographics of data associated with the increase in textbook prices that have outpaced inflation, medical services, and even new home costs. [attached graphic 1 & 2]  As Chris Zook also noted, community college students are two times more likely to purchase textbooks with their financial aid than four-year college students which increases their financial burden to complete their degree.  When faculty build OER courses, they can decrease this burden and share their course content with others who are working towards giving equal access to higher education.

OER is at the forefront of Arizona Western College because it is an integral part of our institution’s strategic planning goals to make higher education more accessible for our student population where the average yearly salary is only $38,237.    We are a year into this goal with our first formal OER training taking place in June 2019.  When Matthew first asked us if we share our teaching materials, most of us said “Sure! We share with our colleagues often.”  But then he followed that up with “How willing are you to share your developed content with the world?”  And that is the difference between a free versus an OER course.  If a faculty member develops open course content and licenses it under the Creative Commons License, the material can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed (known as the 5R activities) by others.  The creator of the open content can control how their material is used with the different Creative Commons licenses. [Creative Commons License gif] With the shared content, the OER movement aims to provide quality teaching materials that can be used in an open creative and collaborative manner while benefitting students in reducing textbook costs.

I did not realize the importance of Matthew’s question until I started my search for OER content with Creative Commons Licensing for our OER transitioning Anatomy and Physiology courses.  We will be using the OpenStax A & P textbook starting this Fall and even though Matthew gave us some good starting points to search for open resources that follow the 5R activities, it has been difficult finding pictures and diagrams that can be used in lecture and activities.  I have been able to find various posts to labs, power point slides, videos, and open textbooks that can be used for A&P.  The most common issue is the lack of quality science pictures or diagrams offered as open content, which I have also heard is a problem from other colleagues transitioning to OER. 

So, here’s my challenge question for you: Are you willing to share your developed content, pictures, and diagrams with the world?  If you are, please license them and share so that you can be a part of this OER movement and others can also collaborate and build that open content. Ultimately, this is about the ability to be inclusive and provide quality higher education for our students without burdening them with textbook costs.

If you are interested in this OER movement and are looking for information or content, please check out the following resources:

This list is in no way inclusive.  There are many other resources out there, they just take time to find and to search through.  I hope more of the scientific community takes part in this OER movement and can provide more resources for everyone to use or collaborate on.  It truly makes a difference to our students and their education.

Joann Chang, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biology and the Director for the Center for Instructional Excellence at Arizona Western College (AWC), a community college in Yuma, Arizona.  She currently manages the professional development for AWC and teaches A&P and Introduction to Engineering Design.  When she’s not teaching or directing, she is keeping up with her twin daughters, son, husband, three cats and one dog.  On her spare time, she is baking delicious goodies for her friends and family.

An inventory of meaningful lives of discovery

by Jessica M. Ibarra

I always had this curiosity about life. Since the very beginning, always wanting to understand how animals’ breathe, how they live, how they move. All that was living was very interesting. – Dr. Ibarra

“I always had this curiosity about life and I wanted to become a doctor, but my parent told me it was not a good idea,” Lise Bankir explained in her interview for the Living History Project of the American Physiological Society (APS).  The video interview (video length: 37.14 min.) is part of a rich collection over 100 senior members of the APS who have made outstanding contributions to the science of physiology and the profession. 

The archive gives us great insight into how these scientists chose their fields of study.  As Dr. Bankir, an accomplished renal physiologist, explain how she ended up “studying the consequences of vasopressin on the kidney.”  She describes her work in a 1984 paper realizing “high protein was deleterious for the kidney, because it induces hyperfiltration,” which of course now we accept that high protein accelerates the progression of kidney disease. Later she describes her Aha! moment, linking a high protein diet to urea concentration, while on holiday. 

“It came to my mind that this adverse effect of high protein diet was due to the fact that the kidney not only to excrete urea (which is the end product of proteins), but also to concentrate urea in the urine.  Because the plasma level of urea is already really low and the daily load of urea that humans excrete need that urea be concentrated about 100-fold (in the urine with respect to plasma).” 

Other interviews highlight how far ahead of their time other scientists were.  As is the case when it comes to being way ahead of teaching innovations and active learning in physiology with  Dr. Beverly Bishop.  In her video interview, you can take inspiration from her 50 years of teaching neurophysiology to physical therapy and dental students at SUNY in New York (video length: 1 hr. 06.09 min.).  Learn about how she met her husband, how she started her career, and her time in Scotland.  Dr. Bishop believed students could learn better with experimental laboratory activities and years ahead of YouTube, she developed a series of “Illustrated Lectures in Neurophysiology” available through APS to help faculty worldwide.

She was even way ahead of others in the field of neurophysiology.  Dr. Bishop explains, “everyone knows that they (expiratory muscles) are not very active when you are sitting around breathing quietly, and yet the minute you have to increase ventilation (for whatever reason), the abdominal muscles have to play a part to have active expiration.  So, the question I had to answer was, “How are those muscles smart enough to know enough to turn on?” Her work led to ground breaking work in neural control of the respiratory muscles, neural plasticity, jaw movements, and masticatory muscle activity.

Another interview shed light on a successful career of discovery and their implications to understanding disease, as is the case with the video interview of Dr. Judith S. Bond. She describes the discovery of meprins proteases as her most significant contribution to science (video length: 37.38 min.), “and as you know, both in terms of kidney disease and intestinal disease, we have found very specific functions of the protease.  And uh, one of the functions, in terms of the intestinal disease relates to uh inflammatory bowel disease.  One of the subunits, meprin, alpha subunit, is a candidate gene for IBD and particularly ulcerative colitis. And so that opens up a window to – that might have significance to the treatment of ulcerative colitis.”

Or perhaps you may want to know about the life and research of Dr. Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen, the first woman president of the APS (video length: 1 hr. 18.07 min.) and daughter of August and Marie Krogh.  In her interview, she describes her transition from dentistry to field work to study water balance on desert animals and how she took her family in a van to the Arizona desert and while pregnant developed a desert laboratory and measured water loss in kangaroo rats.  Dr. Schmidt-Nielsen was attracted to the early discoveries she made in desert animals, namely that these animals had specific adaptations to reduce their expenditure of water to an absolute minimum to survive. 

The Living History Project managed to secure video interviews with so many outstanding contributors to physiology including John B. West, Francois Abboud, Charles Tipton,  Barbara Horwitz, Lois Jane Heller, and L. Gabriel Navar to name a few.  For years to come, the archive provides the opportunity to learn from their collective wisdom, discoveries, family influences, career paths, and entries into science. 

As the 15th anniversary of the project approaches, we celebrate the life, contributions, dedication, ingenuity, and passion for science shared by this distinguished group of physiologists.  It is my hope you find inspiration, renewed interest, and feed your curiosity for science by taking the time to watch a few of these video interviews. 

Dr. Jessica M. Ibarra is an Assistant Professor of Physiology at Dell Medical School in the Department of Medical Education of The University of Texas at Austin.  She teaches physiology to first year medical students.  She earned her B.S. in Biology from the University of Texas at San Antonio.  Subsequently, she pursued her Ph.D. studies at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship.  Her research studies explored cardiac extracellular matrix remodeling and inflammatory factors involved in chronic diseases such as arthritis and diabetes.  When she is not teaching, she inspires students to be curious about science during Physiology Understanding Week in the hopes of inspiring the next generation of scientists and physicians. Dr. Ibarra is a native of San Antonio and is married to Armando Ibarra.  Together they are the proud parents of three adult children – Ryan, Brianna, and Christian Ibarra.

Five lesson design tips to help your learners find their Happy Place (…with some help from Dr Seuss)

We’ve all been there, that unhappy place at the pointy end of some badly designed learning material. You know the place – it’s grim and grey and jammed full of text-laden power point slides, complicated jargon, and at least one terrifying pie graph with microscopic labeling. It’s a place that’s confusing, generic, and entirely unengaging for you as a learner. In the words of Dr. Seuss, “You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.”[1]

And dark these places are. The challenge can be even greater when you’re creating online lessons for students to use away from the classroom. But that’s where thoughtful lesson design helps: it switches on the floodlights, clears the way, and points your students in the right direction by putting them at the center of the learning experience, whether a teacher is in the room with them or not.

So, here are five simple design tips for creating effective and engaging online lessons, so you can help your learners find their happy place and stay on track:

 

Tip 1: Keep it simple!

  • Define your learning outcomes and post them in the lesson.
  • If content doesn’t support your instructional goals, delete it!
  • Make notes of relevant, contextual examples that could bring “life” to the learning outcomes, and help students understand why they are learning it.
  • Some hacks specifically for Life Science teaching:

 

Tip 2: Break up the text

  • Use your learning outcomes to help guide you in dividing up / chunking your text.
  • Keep sentences and paragraphs short and simple.
  • Highlight the focal points using headings, text formatting, color, and contrast.
  • Intentionally leave blank space on your lesson pages – it can be a powerful design tool to give important concepts some buffer space to call attention to their importance.
  • Make use of lists, bullet points, and tables to present information:

 

Tip 3: Make it visual

Did you know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is backed by neuroscience? Research suggests that we remember more of what we see than what we read.[2]

Try these:

  • Use icons as virtual “signposts” for extra information. You can use these in multiple lessons to add cohesiveness.
  • Turn information into graphs or infographics for your lessons – you could even turn this into an assessment for students. This works especially well for conveying relationships or showing steps in a process:

Here’s another example of a complementary visual element:

 

These are some of our favorite free resources to help you create or add public domain or Creative Commons media to your lessons:

Note: While free, most of the sources above require proper attribution. Don’t forget to give the creator a virtual high-five by adding a citation to their media!

 

Tip 4: Ask questions

Adding practice and feedback to lessons is the most effective way to enhance the retention and recall of new material [3,4,5]. It also enables students to check their understanding and self-monitor for misconceptions early on in the learning process.

Test it out:

  • Distribute formative questions with feedback throughout lessons, not just at the end. (By making questions formative, the emphasis is placed on learning rather than earning or losing points.)
  • Mix up question types: categorizing, matching, ordering, and labeling exercises, MCQs, completing tables, free recall, etc. Variety in quizzing strengthens the ability to recall information down the road.
  • Are there still big blocks of text in your lessons? Try turning text into interactive questions! Students can order steps in a process, match terms and definitions, correct false statements into true statements, categorize by function, characteristic, etc.
  • Ask questions and create activities that check knowledge about the most important aspects of the instruction. Use your learning objectives to guide you!

 

Tip 5: Connect & reflect

Ask students to draw out new questions, connections, and conclusions through reflective activities. Actions like summarizing information into words or diagrams help students organize new information into preexisting schema, aiding the conversion of long-term memory [3,4].

 

Some reflective ideas:

  • Teach a new concept to friends or family members.
  • Brainstorm analogies that link new topics to well known ones.
  • Create a mind map or other visual or auditory representation that highlights the main points and connections between concepts.
  • Ask students how they would respond in a series of scenario-based questions.
  • Design a research project or critique a research paper.
  • Brainstorm what questions they still have about the subject, to encourage curiosity and further self-directed learning.

________

Ultimately, even simple tweaks to how you display information will have a big impact on students’ attitude toward and engagement with course materials. To help, download this cool infographic of our lesson design tips to keep handy when designing your lessons!
These design elements are a way to shift from instructor-led lessons to ones where the student is the center of the design and learning experience. If you can spend a small amount of time and effort on lesson design it can greatly enhance student motivation and increase time on task – turning them into the brainy, footsy, mountain-moving achievers they are destined to be.

 

The only question now is…will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed) [1]

 

References:

[1] Seuss, Dr. (1990). Oh, the places you’ll go! New York: Random House.

[2] Medina, J. (2014). Brain rules: 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home and school. Seattle: Pear press.

[3] Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: the science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

[4] Malamud, C. (2016, Oct 6). Strategies For Effective Online Instruction: A Conversation with Michelle D Miller. The eLearning Coach Podcast. [Audio podcast] Retrieved from http://theelearningcoach.com/podcasts/36/

[5] Larsen, D. P, Butler, A.C., and Roediger, H. L. (2008). Test-enhanced learning in medical education. Medical Education. 42: 959–966. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2008.03124.x

 

Ellen Crimmins (MS) is an instructional designer and ocean enthusiast. She loves studying how people learn and working with educators to bring their online lessons to life. Away from the computer screen, you can find her exploring nature trails and 50s themed diners with her better thirds (husband and dog).
Sina Walker (MSciComm) is a writer and former natural history filmmaker. She has three little boys so doesn’t have time for many hobbies, but enjoys taking mom-dancing to new levels of awesome.
Marissa Scandlyn (PhD) is a product manager at ADInstruments by day, and a netballer by night. She’s researched new drug treatments for breast cancer and children’s leukemia with her pharmacology background, and was previously the coordinator of ADI’s team of Instructional Designers. Marissa enjoys reading, movie watching, and being mum to the cutest dog in the world, Charlie.
Course Preparation for a First Timer – Tips and Example Steps to Take

 


idea		 This summer has been a uniquely exciting time for me as I prepare to teach my very first course, Human Physiology! What are the steps you take for preparing your courses? If it is your first time teaching, preparation seems overwhelming, and a challenge to figure out where to even begin. In this blog, I will be describing the steps I’ve taken to get ready for teaching my first course at our nearby minority-serving community college this fall. Full disclosure — I am definitely not an expert in course preparation, but I’ve included some tips and resources for what has worked for me.

Step 1: Reflection and determining my teaching philosophy

Reflecting on my time as an undergraduate student, I realize that learning how to learn did not come easy. It took me more than half way through my undergraduate years to figure out how to do it, and it was not until I was a graduate student that I mastered that skill. Thinking about my future students, I sought training opportunities to aid me in becoming a teacher who effectively facilitates student learning. I especially am interested in teaching practices that foster learning in first-generation college students who are not yet experienced with knowing how to learn and study. I want to make sure that my teaching style is inclusive of as many diverse student populations as possible. To do this, I have to educate myself on learning theories and effective teaching methods.

Early this summer, I attended the West Coast National Academies’ Summer Institute on Scientific Teaching to educate myself on teaching methods, and went home with understanding of the practices that fit my style and my philosophy. I highly recommend others to take advantage of these types of events or workshops (such as those offered by CIRTL) to familiarize yourself with various techniques. Aside from formal workshops, informal meetings with teaching mentors or experienced teachers gives valuable insight into the kinds of things to expect, things to avoid, suggestions and tips, teaching experiences, and inspirational words of wisdom. Use your network of mentors! Overall, inward reflection, formal workshops, and informal conversations with experienced mentors are ways that have helped me formulate the teaching practices that I will use for the course.

Step 2: Book and technology selection for the course

This sounds like an easy task, however, it can be a challenge if it is the first time you learn how to deal with choosing a book and the technology for your course. Luckily, one of my teaching mentors introduced me to the publisher’s local representative who met with me for several hours to discuss various book options and the technological tools that could be combined with my order. The rep helped me register my course in their online tool (Mastering A&P) and trained me to use this technology for creating homework, quizzes, interactive activities, rosters and grading. Thus far, I’ve spent countless hours exploring and learning how to use this technology before class starts. After all, I can’t expect my students to maneuver it if I can’t do it myself!

Step 3: Creating a syllabus, alignment table, and rubrics

The most important, hence time-consuming, task thus far is selecting the major topics and level of depth for the course while deciding the most important concepts, ideas, and skills for students to take away from the course. In order for students to meet expectations and become successful learners in the course, both the instructor and students should have this information clearly written out and understood at the very start of the course. The course syllabus is the first place where overall learning goals, outcomes, and expectations for the students for this course is presented. Furthermore, the syllabus should include information about grading, and any institutional policies on attendance, add/drop deadlines, and disability services.

Fortunately, the course that I am preparing has been offered multiple times previously, and thus I do not need to completely design a new course from scratch. However, I am re-designing and modifying sections of the course to include active and interactive teaching techniques. To guide this process during the semester, creating an alignment table for the course is beneficial to effectively execute learning activities and teach key concepts, ideas and skills. The components included in this table are: course learning goals, daily learning objectives, assignments, summary of activities, and assessments for each class period.

Take note that assessments should be determined first in order to prepare the content and activities for the class period accordingly (backwards design). Assessments could include an in-class activity, post-class assignments, exam and quiz questions. Rubrics of assessments should be made without ambiguity to formally assess students and to make sure the class period addresses the major points that students will be expected to learn. Preparing each class period, with flexibility for modifications based on gauging student grasp of the material, will help the semester run more smoothly and with less difficulties.

Step 4: Preparing content presentation and materials for activities

The last step I will take for course preparation is making and uploading any PowerPoint slides, handout materials, assignments, quizzes and exams, and any other material required for activities. With an alignment table already made, this portion of preparation should be relatively easy, but it will still take a significant amount of time.

Final Tips

Overall advice, plan ahead!! At minimum, it should take an entire summer to successfully prepare for a new course. With a well-planned course ahead of time, the hope is to be able to spend more energy throughout the semester to transfer and translate faculty enthusiasm for teaching into student enthusiasm for learning physiology!

Additional resource: Course Preparation Handbook by Stanford Teaching Commons

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Angelina Hernández-Carretero is an IRACDA Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego and is an adjunct faculty member at San Diego City College. She earned her Ph.D. in Cellular & Integrative Physiology from Indiana University School of Medicine. Her research interests involve diabetes, obesity, and metabolism. Angelina has a passion for mentoring, increasing diversity in STEM education and workforce, and inspiring the next generation through outreach.