Teaching an Immersive Experiential Introductory Biomedical Engineering Course in the Land of Covid (AKA: An Old Dog Has to Learn New Tricks)

Abstract

Clarkson University's BR200 is a highly interactive and well-subscribed (~50 students per term) face-to-face entry-level biomedical engineering class. Its title is Introduction to Biomedical and Rehabilitation Engineering. This long paper deals with the successes and pitfalls of taking this course abruptly online mid-course in the spring 2020 semester and as a hybrid but mainly remote fall 2020 course, both as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This class had been taught for over 25 semesters by the same instructor with the help of a few guest lectures. The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic profoundly altered the way any business or social interaction could be carried out. Universities were no exception. One day in mid-March 2020 undergraduate students were suddenly told to pack up and leave campus. All instruction was then to be remote. We describe and analyze 1) the incremental changes made in the approach to teaching this face-to-face class that were implemented from spring 2011 until fall 2019 based on feedback and assessment; 2) the changes made to the in-person spring 2020 class at its start because of a fall 2019 two-day institutional Quality Matters2 (QM) class taken by the instructor; 3) the rapid, fairly painless and sometimes clueless transition mid-spring 2020 to online instruction aided by the QM rubrics that were already in place for the class; and 4) the painful but necessary transition to a “proper” method of hybrid teaching (split in-class and online) that was greatly aided by the University's offering of a 4-week volunteer (i.e., no pay) intensive summer program for faculty entitled “RISE: Reframing Instruction for Success Everywhere.”3 Using abundant student assessment and reflective data, this paper takes a deep dive into lessons learned, work required, comparisons of didactic approaches, and how students' assessments changed. The first author relates how he, as an old dog and set in using his unlearned teaching methods, had to learn new tricks in order to survive as an effective instructor during a pandemic. The Quality Matters and the RISE courses prepared the instructor for better online course management, especially for the hybrid fall 2020 term. But the hours required for course management increased >10-fold for the fall term over the course as it was previously offered. BR200 used a highly effective interactive synchronous exercise to get naive students fired up about the biomedical engineering field. Translating this synchronous immersive exercise for remote learning was a challenge. The students really missed or found it hard to carry out interactive class assignments either with the professor or with each other. The majority of students surveyed in the COVID era said that they preferred face-to-face classes but tolerated remote learning because they needed to. Yet when given the chance to be face-to-face in a hybrid class, only 1 or 2 students did so. The 8am class time played a role, but COVID-avoidance might have been a bigger cause. Student vaccination only became available mid-April 2021. Module-based untimed open-source quizzes, although difficult, were preferred by the students over hand-written open notebook midterms and finals. Many commented that their stress was significantly reduced even if they struggled with the quizzes. The open-access online flipped finals yielded more complete answers than did an open-notebook in-class final. Flipped testing required the students to outline what they had learned from each module and provide a synopsis in the form of a summary essay for review. In addition to finding out what they knew, the instructor could determine what they didn't know or had misconceptions with.