Hello All!

I’m late in posting, 1. because I missed our first class, and 2. I’m posting right before class so that no one feels that they have to write responses—it’s been great, a week with just reading! I hate to take that away from everyone.

I teach large format Biology courses, my main course is Anatomy and Physiology. In a good semester, I will have 230 students in my class, in a bad semester, 350+. We meet in lecture halls which seat 150 students at a time.

A challenge is to encourage active learning and class discussion in such a large course. Some students tend to dominate in class, others are shy and intimidated to speak up when responding to questions. Having class discussion groups is a nightmare due to stadium seating, and the noise level in a class of 150 can be intolerable.

We currently have “clicker” type software, using the students’ smartphones to respond to questions, but we can only use multiple choice questions. I would like to have the students complete clinical critical thinking problems instead, and to brainstorm with other members of the class, in a time efficient way, that would not require them to leave their seats.

Idea 1: Create a texting platform, similar to YikYak, which would allow the students within the lecture hall to create online discussions to the questions. The instructor would be able to see the contents of the chat as it is occurring. If the instructor presents multiple questions, we could find a method to divide the students into groups, and they would discuss their problems over the chat. The instructor could decide if the students would present their findings, or there could be a class-wide discussion following each chat session to talk about some of the comments. Unlike YikYak, the entire session would be captured for the instructor to later review if they like.

Idea 2: This is a fun little idea for my high school outreach summer program students. I will admit I got this idea in part from my husband, as Google visited his office the other day and brought goodies. Our department has a green initiative to reduce the amount of hazardous waste produced by our large format classes, so we have moved from dissections to virtual cadaver model programs–which requires students to purchase a code from a publisher to use. In our summer high-school outreach programs, they have an option to take a general bio or anatomy prep course, and it would be nice to provide students with this software option, but it is not cost-effective. If we could create a cadaver dissection app for these students, and add (this was my husband’s idea) Google Cardboard, to make it a virtual reality cadaver app, I think this would be a lot of fun and be a good learning tool for students at this level.