Application for the 2020 Excellence in Teaching Award: E-Learning Instruction

Nominees:

Dr. Marin Gillis, PhD, LPh

Professor & Chief, Division of Ethics, Humanities, Arts, and Design

Abbr. CV

Kendra Kirchmer, BArch, MFA

Assistant Professor, Division of Ethics, Humanities, Arts, and Design

Interactive, web-based, pre-reading from BMS 6071 The Community Engaged Physician 1, in support of a flipped classroom group hacking event.

Small group activity from BMS 6826 Ethical Foundations of Medicine, exemplifying self-facilitated, case-based learning.

Small group activity from an Osler Friday Ethics Session exemplifying interactivity and responsive features.

Our Statement:

Statement of 300 words max, with responses to any one or two of the following:

a. Discuss your greatest challenge in e-learning instruction and how you dealt with it or hope to address it. 

We wanted to create e-learning modules to meet a  challenge in our small groups, namely, the ability for students to self-facilitate their learning since we have a dearth of trained facilitators in ethics. We were looking for something that would offer clear impactful headings, interactive glossaries and maps, effective use of images, and beautiful aesthetics—colors, fonts and layouts. We found a software called RISE and grant money with which to purchase it. RISE is easy to use, had amazing learner to content interactivity, was intuitive not only to create but to use, and was inherently responsive and automatically adapted to any device.  Once we started to design and implement e-learning with RISE, we expanded its utility to for enhanced facilitated sessions and content delivery. All of our present e-learning interventions are for synchronous small group learning, but they could be used for individual learning and asynchronous group learning, and we look forward to creating such for students to engage self-directed learning in ethics and critical thinking during clerkships.

One of the major challenges in developing online learning  materials is how much expertise is needed: educational,  technological, and subject-knowledge. We address this challenge by working collaboratively to include those with the necessary knowledge and skill of developing curriculum, what we intend the students to learn, and instructional design, how the students will learn it. Medical students also learn best when they can see the application of their lessons to real-life clinical cases, and this requires collaboration with clinicians whom we have called on to help with case development. We look forward to expanding our collaborations as we continue to pioneer this learning technology in the medical school inviting more clinicians, scientists,  education and ed tech experts from HWCOM.