By MARTY LEVINE
Anatomy courses need anatomical specimens, models, or at least images for students to view from many angles, to see inside the body parts and to understand how each part connects to surrounding structures.
The need became particularly acute during the pandemic, says Burhan Gharaibeh, biological sciences faculty member in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, when he realized he could no longer hold items up for viewing during a remote class demonstration — and that students would not always be able to come to class and get that experience themselves. “I was scrambling all over the place” for suitable images to use instead, Gharaibeh says.
It’s difficult to find images that are copyright-free, that can be magnified and that allow for interior views, adds Erika Fanselow, neuroscience faculty member in the Dietrich School. “They don’t go into the depth we want to go into,” she says of available pictures or drawings. And sometimes the opposite issue is encountered — they are designed for pre-med students, whereas the large anatomy classes in Dietrich attract every variety of future healthcare professional as well as those in other science careers where anatomical knowledge is required.
So Gharaibeh and Fanselow teamed for a project proposal that was among the seven winners of this year’s Innovation in Education Awards from the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence. The pair are now in the midst of developing new collections of online anatomical imagery that employ the latest web technology (the HTML5 Package, or H5P) for best use with Canvas in all varieties of undergraduate anatomy courses and labs.
Their anatomy classes have long been dependent on available illustrations, photographs and dissection videos. “But sometimes they are not screened for accuracy” and don’t always go well with Canvas, notes Gharaibeh. Traditional anatomy textbooks use imagery to teach students how to list or label a body part’s structures, “but sometimes the angle isn’t the angle we’re looking for,” he says. And he and Fanselow need to use this imagery for lessons that go far beyond mere labeling.
When you teach anatomy, Fanselow explains, existing imagery for use in class has mostly been two-dimensional, allowing students to see where a certain structure connects to a bone, or where certain neurons are located that control certain movements. Seeking imagery that can be used with H5P will allow instructors to go into further depth — quite literally — with imagery.
H5P’s versatility also “takes our teaching into the area called gaming so students who are computer savvy don’t get bored,” Gharaibeh says.
“We are trying to make very engaging materials,” Fanselow adds.
Creating online quizzes and projects around these images will also allow the instructors to provide students with extra lessons – hints, if you will – as well as track which students get an answer right and wrong “and where are we going wrong in explaining this anatomical structure,” Gharaibeh says.
Where previous anatomy quizzes with static imagery simply tested a student’s ability to memorize facts, with assignments based on the new imagery “students actually need to think at a different level,” Fanselow says. “This is a new shift on what I can test them on.”
Finding appropriate, usable imagery is not always easy, she says. The Creative Commons, for one, already licenses images, and images also can be created from labs performed by students currently. Right now the pair of professors is collecting images with the help of Pitt’s Health Sciences Library System and consulting with members of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society to see what images are commonly used in other anatomy classes — collecting responses to see what is freely accessible and most valuable as teaching tools.
With the help of their teaching assistants, the project team will next create new course content from the images — “a library of engaging H5P interactive tools,” as their proposal describes it, most suitable for anatomy courses. They will use their own classes to pilot the new content this semester and next, then approach other Pitt schools and departments to help them make best use of the materials.
They also plan to chart whether and how students attain increased comprehension and grades, as well as their level of engagement with the new material. They may even create cell-phone friendly exercises and quizzes, if that’s how the students can learn the material most readily.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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