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Flipping the Anatomy and Neuroanatomy Classrooms in the First Year of Dental School
Author(s) -
Druzinsky Robert E,
Doubleday Allison F
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.31.1_supplement.581.1
Subject(s) - curriculum , attendance , reading (process) , medical education , multimedia , narrative , mathematics education , psychology , computer science , medicine , pedagogy , art , literature , political science , law , economics , economic growth
Over the past few years, faculty in the UIC College of Dentistry have found that attendance at lectures has been poor, often 50% or less, in the first year curriculum. All lectures in the D1 curriculum are recorded automatically using the Echo360 system and these videos are used routinely by students. Pass rates for D1 students at UIC for Part I of the National Board Examination, which is taken in the middle of the second year of the curriculum, have been extremely high ‐ 100% for the past five years. In other words, many of our students are successful in spite of the fact that they rarely attend the lectures in the basic sciences and many students often watch recordings of lectures rather than attend in person. Since students use recorded lectures to study already, we believe that classroom time can be used more productively. Therefore, in the current academic year we are flipping the classroom for many sessions. Rather than presenting new material in the classroom, we ask students to prepare ahead of time by reading from assigned texts and completing various assignments online. We are using several software tools to create these online activities. Rather than simply editing videos from previous years, new videos, usually less than 30 minutes long, are produced. The TechSmith Camtasia © add in for Microsoft Powerpoint © is used to create videos with audio narration over the slides. Presentations are in tablet mode so that the instructor can draw on the slides and the drawings are recorded. The videos opened in Camtasia © where the video and audio are edited. The most recent version of Camtasia © also allows quizzes to be created and added to the videos. Students are required to watch the videos and complete the quizzes before they attend the classroom session. Scores on these quizzes are exported automatically to the Blackboard © gradebook for the class. Applications such as SoftChalk © and Explain Everything © , along with the testing function in Blackboard, are also being used to produce interactive materials that students must finish before coming to the classroom. These activities hold students accountable for the content and act as formative assessment for both faculty and students. Face to face classroom sessions now include very few traditional didactic lectures. Students are quizzed on the relevant material using TurningPoint Cloud © , Kahoot © , and other polling tools. TurningPoint Cloud © is particularly useful because it is very flexible and, like Camtasia © , scores are recorded automatically in Blackboard © . Most of the face to face class time is used as a question and answer session. Although the flipped classroom approach is new to us, and we have no hard data for any real evaluation, we have found that questions asked by students indicate that they are coming to the classroom far better prepared than they have in previous years.