Formative online assessment in medicine Video Lecture | Teach Online: A Comprehensive Approach for Teaching Online - Professional Skills

my online teaching predominantly occurs
in our medical program in which we have
over the course of six year
undergraduate program around 1,800
students indeed I believe that
assessment and formative assessment is
probably the most important part of our
of our teaching and and the biggest
driver for learning and in a large
cohort such as we have it's very
difficult to do that on an individual
basis so I turn to technology to provide
formative feedback on students responses
in our virtual microscopy teaching we
use browser-based
viewing of microscopic sections of
tissue but students find it very
difficult to understand what they're
seeing and to address that in our large
prac classes we've used virtual
microscopy adaptive tutorials we're now
looking at a macroscopic section of a
diseased heart and students are asked to
drag different colored stars onto
various regions so the last the last one
I will deliberately get wrong and I will
now submit those answers and I get the
feedback that the first three stars I
correctly located but the fourth one I
didn't and now I have a chance to try
again if I still don't get it correct I
get feedback again if I fail to get it
correct for a third time I get feedback
as to where the the star should have
been been dragged and I get directed to
a remedial video about this particular
tissue so that I can understand better
what the areas that I need to
I need to identify online concept
mapping has really helped me understand
how different things link together
especially when I don't understand very
much about a topic it gives me a basis
to work off and some where to start so
this is an online formative assessment
for one of our phase one medicine
courses it encompasses questions
relating to all of the disciplines which
are integrated into each of our courses
and generally they tend to be based on
clinical scenarios so we have a scenario
at the top and then there are questions
related to it
some of them MCQs some of the multiple
response occasionally true/false and
here we have drop-down lists we also
have image based questions where
students need to drag and drop markers
onto images this is of course a model of
of the upper respiratory tract and also
microscopic images as well so when
students have completed the assessments
they submit their work and they can get
detailed feedback on those questions
that they have responded to and at the
end of the assessment when we continue
we get a detailed assessment of how we
did in each of the discipline components
within that assessment so it gives
students a a better idea about where
they need to do more study prior to
their final exams because our medicine
program is integrated we need students
to integrate concepts across domains and
so for that we've used online testable
concept maps to provide formative
feedback and to get students to see the
big picture this is a concept map with
some of the Khan
ceps and linking phrases cut out of it
and the student needs to drag-and-drop
these concepts and linking phrases into
the appropriate part of the map that
I've put in three concepts there and if
I submit I can then see which concepts
are put in correctly which I did not and
I then get a completed map as feedback
as well
doing the formative assessments at the
end of each term has saved me time in a
way in that it allows me to know which
subjects I need to focus more energy on
and and also which are my stronger
subjects that maybe I would have wasted
time doing extra work on they
particularly value the feedback provided
by the online formative assessments and
the virtual microscopy adaptive
tutorials they value the integration
that the online testable concept Maps
provide and the overall big picture
understanding that that that it enables
them to gain a student can use these
online components to consolidate what we
just learned and we also will also be
informed that we could use it after the
class for the exam revision I think the
feedback that we get with online
learning is really helpful and the fact
that it's very non-confrontational I can
get a bit scared to ask questions in
class being able to take my time to go
through what we're learning and then to
see how my understanding matches up with
what we should know has been really
helpful for students I think that they
they appreciate the capacity to use
online technologies wherever they are
whenever they have the opportunity to do
so because students have busy lives
outside of their University scheduled 15
hours on a bus every week it has
encouraged me to use that time to study
and it's been a good use of my time it's
more of a self-help tools that student
can decide on how often and when to
access
issue for all of these things is to
anticipate students common
misconceptions and to trap those those
misconceptions with your questions and
to provide appropriate feedback to
remediate those misconceptions that's
that's the the powerful learning effect
of these tools the rationale has to be
absolutely clear as to what you're
trying to achieve if the if the online
learning is an addition but not but not
embedded in the curriculum there's
there's a high chance of failure so very
important that anything that is created
is it's well thought out beforehand is
embedded in the curriculum and is
appropriately evaluated and continuously
improved following feedback
online formative assessments we use a
dedicated software package known as
question mark perception where we find
it to be particularly valuable is in
image based questions because my
discipline pathology is a very image
based discipline as are many other
medical disciplines and we can use image
based questions where students can
interact with the images as well as
typical multiple choice and multiple
response and and open-ended essay type
questions as well
the other aspect of that software is it
provides very comprehensive analytics so
we can quickly learn where students are
having difficulties and we can actually
adjust our teaching in in response to
that we've also got a large database of
macroscopic and microscopic images of
disease and recently we've converted
that into an app for our students to be
able to use in the mobile environment
this is important because our students
are distributed widely not just on the
main campus but in teaching hospitals
throughout Sydney and also on campuses
through northern and southern New South
Wales
assessments have a beneficial effect on
students learning outcomes at the end of
their courses we've shown that that
participation in these and performance
in those assessments makes a difference
to their to their final assessment
scores online formative assessments are
as something could be used universally
in almost any discipline the rewards are
in your students learning outcomes it's
so much better to have something that's
specifically tailored to what we're
learning in class and to what we're
expected to know and in that respect
having the university based online
tutorials has been very helpful and
saved me a lot of wasted time using
other online technologies that are less
helpful
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