Faculty Experiences - Chris Roberts

CHRIS ROBERTS

Physiological Science

Interview Topics What matters most to you in your teaching? How are you using technology as a tool to achieve your teaching goals? How have your students responded to your use of technology? What new goals do you have for using technology in teaching? How could the University better facilitate the use of technology in instruction?

Pedagogy Alternative view points Relate theory to practice Show what you're talking about

Technology Animations Audio Blackboard Chat sessions Class web site Discussion board Flash Online lectures Online quizzes PowerPoint (software) Video

Visualizing Physiological Processes

I teach Physiological Science 5, in which students learn how diet and exercise affect chronic disease, health, fitness and performance. One of my main goals is to make a difference in the students' lives, because most of them have absolutely no concept of how their diets and activities affect their health. Beyond making sure they learn the material, I want them to be able to implement what they learn when they buy food at the store or go to the weight room to workout. The course has a lab component in which students have to analyze their diets for a week, then enter the results into the computer and run a battery of health and fitness tests on themselves. The results they get from the dietary analysis and fitness tests, they use to write diet and exercise recommendations for themselves.
One way I encourage this real-life application is to show news videos from shows such as 20/20 and Dateline NBC on hot health-related topics like low-carb diets, supplements, and abdominal exercises. The students really like those. I like to show a video with a perspective that's different from mine so that they understand that the media may have one particular stance on things that might lead to different conclusions from what the scientific evidence has actually shown. When they see the video, they think, "Oh, that's the way it is!" But when we review the science in class, they learn that the video is just a journalistic interpretation, and that you can't really believe everything that you read in a magazine or see on TV.

In my experience, students tend to prefer a technology-supported classroom environment to the traditional chalk-board methods. I'm kind of a visual learner, so I'm a visual teacher--I like seeing color and pictures--so all my lectures are now supplemented by PowerPoint slides. Not too many people were using PowerPoint in 1998 when I started. I have been fortunate to get Office of Instructional Development (OID) mini-grants for the last several years, so I can get assistance in updating the slides as the technology improves and more visual materials become available. Textbook publishers also supply me with PowerPoint pictures, and including them makes the concepts we cover more real.

I've also received OID grants in the last couple of years to develop illustrative animations. They're created by an outside company using Flash technology, and  demonstrate a given physiological process using audio and cartoon-like video. One such animation depicts how an artery becomes clogged with cholesterol during the process of athrosclerosis. The pictures and narrative show and tell how the cholesterol gets into the artery wall, how it affects the artery wall, and how those effects may contribute to a heart attack.

Each animation is about 2-3 minutes, and it's split up into 6-10 parts, so the student can watch one part, skip backward or forward to another part, or watch the whole thing all the way through. They're posted on my Blackboard  class web site and can be downloaded to the student's own computer. Although I hold the copyright, I don't mind if students pass them on to other people.

I write up very detailed storyboards, record the audio, and pass everything to the animators. I work with the animators to refine the animation over two or three revisions. The audio narration is accompanied by text, so that if students hear a word they don't recognize, or don't know how to spell, they have the visual cue to rely on.

I first got the idea for doing this in 1998 when Furchgott, Ignarro, and Murad won the Nobel Prize for their work on the function of nitric oxide in the cardiovascular system, and the web announcement featured an animation. Six years ago, an animation on the web was very impressive! I thought, I've got to do that for my class. If someone who didn't know anything about cardiovascular disease or nitric oxide could see that, they'd have a much better appreciation of what it does, even if they didn't understand anything about physiology. The animations are not a substitute for lecture, but provide detailed summaries of individual topics within the lectures. They give the students a chance to study a concept in depth.

I also use my web site for communicating with the students via scheduled online office hour chat sessions and the discussion board. I schedule the chats about 3-5 times every quarter, usually before an exam. There are 2-30 students logged in at any one time, and they basically just bombard me with questions. If they can't make it to my office hours for whatever reason, it's another way they can get in touch with me. That's been really successful--a lot of students have liked that.

I use the discussion board almost every day. Rather than answering 300 emails about the same question one at a time, I can reply once and then 300 students can go look at it. It saves me the time, so I encourage them to use the discussion board instead of sending me personal emails about course materials. I also use the web site to post announcements.

I don't put the PowerPoint slides on the web site, because that encourages people not to come to class. For two quarters I was audio-taping my lectures and posting the digital files on the web. People loved that--I never got a better response! The students that listened to the lectures while reading the assignment told me that hearing it a second time let them pick up a lot of things they may not have fully understood the first time through. But too many people wouldn't go to class--right before the midterm and the final, they'd just go listen to every lecture on line, so I had to stop doing that.

I'm able to keep track of student access of the web site using the Blackboard tools. Life Sciences Instructional Computing (LSIC) sets up my web site every quarter, and creates student profiles and logins using enrollment data from the Registrar. I can see who's looked at the animations, the syllabus, and any other files, and how often. In the future, I'd like to try to increase use of the web site by assigning on-line quizzes and other small web-based tasks.

I don't know if there is a place Life Sciences faculty can go to find out how to implement an idea, but if there isn't one, there should be--a tutor or consultant who can relate to professors, and brainstorm with them how they can incorporate technology into the classroom. I usually figure out what I need on my own, and there is tech support in LSIC for using the Blackboard web sites, but other instructors may need more help than that. I think most professors don't want to try something new because they think it's a lot of work. They don't realize that once you've put in the hours getting a procedure established, it's just a matter of using it.

---