Investigating Multimodal Classroom Experiences across a Biology Curriculum

The Center of Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester aims to deliver an undergraduate curriculum that advances learner‐centered, technology‐enhanced, competency‐based, assessment‐driven education in the health sciences. To accomplish this, the faculty within the life sciences have created multimodal classrooms that are based on recent pedagogical innovations including backward course design, flipped classroom engagement, and highly collaborative learning spaces to create a student‐centered approach to learning. By combining these approaches with a variety of active‐learning implementation strategies and multiple instructors in the classroom space guiding and supporting student activities, we are able to facilitate an environment for learning that is most suited for utilizing cognitive research driven instructional practices. This multimodal approach to learning, entitled the “confluent classroom,” provides faculty the opportunity to focus, at the course level and the series level, on furthering the specific aims of the Center. All course data (e.g. artifacts of student learning, metrics of student performance, course metadata including Learning and Development Outcomes) is collected in an in‐house database and preliminary analysis can be performed with a faculty‐developed Browser of Student and Course Objects (BoSCO). Effectiveness of the confluent classroom model is explored by tracking and comparing individual student performance across a three‐semester core life sciences course series that culminates in a sophomore‐level Anatomy and Physiology II course.