Theme
7BB Approaches to teaching and learning
INSTITUTION
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - Ireland
Pre-class preparation enables students to orientate themselves with regard to key concepts and vocabulary, enhancing the subsequent teaching session. Even for didactic lectures, the provision of notes and handouts in advance enable student orientation, but superficial learners may be less motivated to access these files. While reinforcement of lecture material, by means of small group tutorials or web-based resources, is provided for much of our course, paradoxically the more complex concepts such as embryology tend to be delivered via didactic lectures alone. Therefore, our proposed learning redesign was to provide “Teaser trailers” for a number of these lectures, so that students could preview these prior to coming to their scheduled lectures.
The Gastrointestinal-Hepatology module (GI-HEP) is a system-based, multidisciplinary module, delivered during the First Medical Year in RCSI, and includes anatomy, biochemistry, physiology and embryology content. Summary videos were produced for two embryology lectures (JH) and two biochemistry lectures (SO'N) within this module.
A maximum of 10 slides were chosen from each lecture, and videos were limited to no longer than 5 minutes in length. A readily accessible freeware program (Screencast-O-Matic) was used to record the videos with their scripted "voice-overs". These videos were then uploaded for the students to view online no less than a week in advance of the lecture; students were notified by a forum post (which also triggers an e-mail) that this material had been uploaded and was available for viewing as an additional, optional, resource.
In order to explore the students’ interactions with these videos, we inserted questions into our JC2 Student Survey; these Surveys are constructed and conducted by RCSIs Quality Enhancement Office (QEO), for the purpose of routine audit and evaluation of undergraduate teaching. Students are invited to participate in these surveys by the QEO by e-mail after their end-of-semester examinations are over, and response rates are typically in the region of 50%.
Sixty-five percent of survey respondents (77 / 119) indicated that they had taken the time to view one or more of the videos, and the vast majority (91%) indicated that they found them to be useful to their study. While the videos were prepared in the expectation that students would use them as preview material, most students either used them for both preview and revision purposes (29%), or solely for revision (52%).
RCSI has a large contingent of international students, so we next examined whether were any differences between how native and non-native English speakers used these videos. Native English speaking students were more likely to have accessed these videos than non-native English speakers (70% vs 56%; p=.12 Chi-squared test), but not significantly so. While 6 of the native English speakers indicated that they did not find any of these videos to be useful for their study, only 1 non-native English speaker was in agreement with this (p=.32, Fisher’s Exact test).
- While the videos were prepared in the expectation that students would use them as preview material, most students either used them for both preview and revision purposes, or solely for revision. Future videos will be prepared and scripted with this additional use in mind.
- Non-native English speakers were less likely to access the videos, but more likely to find them to be of use once they did so
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