Cohort July 2023: Faculty of Medicine – Eden Fussner-Dupas, Loulou Cai, Joshua Liu, Yousif Abdulmohsin, Jenny Li, Boxon Zhang, Timothy Wong
Project background
BIOC302 is a required course for many different program streams; offered broadly to UBCV students across multiple scientific disciplines such as engineering, immunology/pharmacology, and food and lands studies. It covers a broad range of topics ranging from metabolism to molecular biology. BIOC302 has historically been offered as an exam-heavy, lecture-focused course with an optional TA-lead tutorial. Students are encouraged, but not required to complete pre-class readings, practice problems and attend tutorial sessions, thereby resulting in assessment that is based entirely on two exams.
We seek to redesign this course to be more student-focused by increasing opportunities in which students can demonstrate mastery of the material. The sheer volume of content covered, coupled with the diversity in student’s academic backgrounds presents a unique challenge in course design as core/foundational content differs between program streams who use BIOC302 as a part of their requirements.
Project details
We plan to build on the project that started with the support of a SoTL seed grant, a study aimed at assessing the impact of converting half (as an internal control) of the course into a blended classroom. During the summer semester of 2023, half of BIOC302 was offered in a blended format. This was advantageous, as we will adapt our approach depending on student feedback obtained during this period. With this foundation, we will convert the second half of this course from the traditional didactic- lecture based format into a blended classroom format. We feel it is essential to have a partnership approach to redesigning this course; as the improved student experience and enhanced engagement is what ultimately motivates these modifications. Only with student stakeholders at the table, can this goal be fully actualized.
Our course redesign will combine asynchronous mini-lectures with in-class exercises. These exercises will be designed to maximize topic flexibility, enabling students to explore topics that relate and expand upon their field of study and allowing for more in-depth and further comprehension. “Blending” is a modification of the “flipped classroom approach” with the distinction being that students are not expected to consume readings nor videos on their own time as we will count the asynchronous videos towards their allotted lecture time. A reflection that students have provided on the flip classroom experience is the notable amount of extra work. We believe that with a blended model we can combine the best of both worlds: pre-class exposure to core concepts and an opportunity to apply ideas in a supported environment, without the additional time cost.
During the summer semester, we saw that this style of learning contributed to an increase in engagement, a deeper understanding, and gave students an opportunity to develop their scientific identity. Providing a framework that enables students to engage in critical thinking and problem solving is a benefit for all science students, and the opportunity to explore topics of individualized academic significance might represent a step towards a more meaningful program-integrated classroom experience.