Use of an elearningbased Honours project to provide formative feedback for junior students and summa

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Use of an e-learning-based Honours project to
provide formative feedback for junior students
and summative assessment for Honours students in
medical sciences Derek Scott, Christian Burgin,
Scott Moore, Jenny Watson the Medi-CAL Unit.
Introduction
Use of the Moodle VLE

• Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System
  (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System
  (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It
  has become very popular among educators around
  the world as a tool for creating online dynamic
  web sites for their students.
• Medi-CAL already use this VLE instead of WebCT to
  provide online material for Dentistry or for
  MBChB students to undertake e-learning projects.
• The Honours project students authoring online
  courses on Moodle have access to scientific
  support from their supervisor in the School of
  Medical Sciences, as well as e-learning design
  and development advice and technical support from
  their supervisor and rest of the team in the
  Medi-CAL Unit.

• The broader range of career destinations for our
  science graduates means that we must provide a
  wider range of Honours projects to prepare them
  for a wider variety of vocations.
• Not every student will wish to use their
  scientific skills in a traditional laboratory
  setting.
• Education and IT-related professions are popular
  amongst science graduates, so an Honours project
  combining these areas with science might prove
  attractive to Honours students and employers.

Peer-Assisted Feedback Assessment
Figure 1. The Moodle homepage where users can
access the different online courses that the have
access to.

• Formative assessment is assessment for learning,
  that is, to help students understand and improve
  on their performance, whereas summative
  assessment is assessment of learning, that is, to
  measure student performance .
• Experience has taught us that junior students
  often respond positively to peer-assisted
  learning activities with other students who are
  nearer their own level of experience.
• We proposed that if the more experienced
  students were able to design formative
  assessments for their more junior counterparts,
  they might be able to identify areas in the
  curriculum that could be taught more effectively
  or at least enhance the learning experiences of
  the students who were progressing after them.
• We also wished to find a way of helping more
  senior students understand both the effective and
  problematic aspects of explaining scientific
  concepts effectively, and also in developing
  useful assessment tools.

Current Projects - E-Learning Design and
Development in Biomedical Sciences

• Figure 2. The Calcium Journey
• This online course is authored by Scott Moore, an
  Honours student in Biomedical Sciences (Anatomy).
• His aim to clarify the role of calcium in human
  physiology.
• He has come up with an innovative method to help
  junior students better understand its complex
  role on the human body by following the sequence
  of events that involve calcium in different human
  tissues.
• Throughout the online course, formative
  assessments/quizzes can be completed by the
  students using the application.

Aims

• As well as providing help for students in junior
  years to assist them in improving their
  understanding of various topics, we also wanted
  to find a way to integrate this with an Honours
  project that 4th year students could undertake.
• It was hoped that this project would prove useful
  in helping develop the Honours students
  understanding of education and IT skills.
• We also hoped that more senior students might be
  able to identify areas of the curriculum which
  they felt could be explained in a more
  student-friendly manner, or which they
  perceived to be harder, and design online
  courses that would improve the learning
  experience of these areas for students in lower
  years.
• The design of these courses could be assessed as
  part of the Honours students projects, whilst
  the junior students could use the material and
  take the online quizzes/assessments to try and
  enhance their understanding and performance.

• Figure 3. Radioligand Binding
• This online course is authored by Christian
  Burgin, an Honours student in Biomedical Sciences
  (Pharmacology).
• His aim to provide students a thorough grounding
  in the application of various experimental
  techniques to drug discovery
• He is using real experimental data to show
  students that they can learn to interpret the
  results and work out what a drug might do or
  where it might act.
• Throughout the online course, formative
  assessments/quizzes can be completed by the
  students using the application.

Methods

• Honours students applied to undertake this
  project and were allocated a place based upon
  academic merit.
• The successful Honours students were asked to
  select and area of the curriculum about which
  they wished to design an online course.
• Students were instructed on the basic use of the
  Moodle Virtual Learning Environment and given
  advice on e-learning design and development by Dr
  J Watson and colleagues in the Medi-CAL Unit.
• Student training followed a similar structure to
  that provided to MBChB students undertaking a
  similar task during their Medical Humanities
  block.
• Students had to design the material for their
  course, which was checked for scientific accuracy
  by School staff, plus had to develop online
  assessments for the students who would be using
  the course.
• Once complete, junior students would be asked to
  test the online courses and assess their
  effectiveness. The results of these
  questionnaires would be analysed by the Honours
  students and any improvements suggested would be
  implemented in the online courses.
• If the online courses were of sufficiently high
  standard, then they would be integrated into the
  Schools curriculum.

How do we assess whether this approach is useful
in helping other students learn?
Conclusions

• This project shows that practical Honours
  projects for medical science students need not
  necessarily take place in a traditional
  laboratory.
• By designing courses to help other students,
  Honours students can gain a better understanding
  of how to apply their scientific training in
  different situations whilst developing new
  transferable skills in education and e-learning.
• Formative assessments for junior students may be
  better designed if more senior students are
  involved in their design and development.
• This type of innovative project may be useful
  when trying to accommodate the needs of the wider
  variety of students that are now more common in
  universities i.e. student with caring
  commitments, students living in rural areas,
  students who have particular disabilities.

• The usefulness of these applications are about to
  be assessed by trialling them with students in
  years 3 and 4 of the various degrees in the
  School of Medical Sciences.
• These questionnaires will likely ask students to
  give their opinions of the various aspects of
  these courses using a Likert scale format i.e.
  rating from 1 to 5 or not helpful to extremely
  helpful etc.
• As well as canvassing student opinion, it would
  be hoped that there would be time to assess the
  view of staff on the usefulness of these online
  courses and compare their attitudes with those of
  the student users.
• The Honours students will analyse the results as
  part of their thesis.
• Moodle can show the authors who is using the
  courses and for how long to allow them to
  quantitatively measure how popular they are and
  also whether there are certain areas that could
  be enhanced.