As an instructor, I'm beyond ecstatic to roll out the fruits of my students' labor - their blog posts! Biology 241 - i.e., pathophysiology - is new curriculum for me this term and because I'm creating a lot as I go, I viewed this class as a "golden opportunity" to try an idea I've wanted to try for some time - an instructional blog.
What is an instructional blog?
While blogs serve many purposes (entertainment, information, product reviews, recipes, etc), the instructional blog serves as a tool of the learning process that can be shared with the world! It is intended to complement and extend classroom lectures and discussions beyond the canned powerpoint-based lecture/textbook format, which is widely used yet isn't necessarily the most effective teaching method for helping students retain information long-term.
The impetus for this is simple. Drawing on my own experiences as an undergraduate student (over 15 years ago now - eek!), the things I remember most were never the lectures, but rather assignments where I was "forced" to explore ideas and create something with those ideas. I have "learned" and forgotten the details of the Kreb's cycle numerous times throughout my career as both student and teacher, yet I have never forgotten how muscles fatigue with continued stimulation. I mean, I still have visions of stringing up a frog gastrocnemius muscle and then zapping it into action (or diminishing action?)! I was "forced" to experiment and then write the details of this experiment and here I am 15 years later recalling this experience in a blog post. In a sense, I'm trying to permanently root some detail of health and disease into my own student's long-term memory stores. More importantly, however, I'm trying to "teach" how to research, understand, and communicate biomedical information (and by "teach" I really mean "learn by doing"). We can only scratch the surface on all there is to learn about human disease in one term. Heck - there's still so much I don't know! What I hope to provide are the skills necessary to discern all the material I can't possibly cover.
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| Image source: Pixabay (CC0 license - public domain) |
The first of two blog posts
Teaching others is an incredibly effective method for learning, and my hope is that the first student blog post essentially allows them to teach their peers (and the world) about a disease process. The target audience is informed, but not a health care professional or individual with a background in biology/biomedical science. To communicate well, the student needs to understand the disease at a deep level in order to clearly and concisely pull out the important details. Creative explanations and metaphors are highly encouraged (not your typical science class for sure!). I can't wait to see their creations!
Assessment of the assignment
At the end of this, I sincerely hope my students share whether this assignment actually achieves what I hope it does and if they have suggestions for how it could be improved.
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