Synopsis

Keywords: Education Committee: Clinical MRI

Online teaching provides a more flexible learning approach, breaking free from spatial constraints. However, ensuring student engagement and learning outcomes becomes a crucial issue. Leveraging interactive teaching designs and online technological tools can effectively enhance students' attention and participation in online courses. The speaker will take the example of teaching an undergraduate course on magnetic resonance imaging to share a method of technology-enhanced learning, fostering online interaction and ensuring student learning outcomes.

Background

While online teaching removes spatial limitations compared to in-person instruction, it often faces challenges in ensuring students' attention due to the “screen barrier”. Consequently, a one-way teaching approach, i.e., pure lecturing, cannot guarantee student engagement and effective learning outcomes.

Case Study

The speaker has taught the undergraduate course of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in his department for ten years. The intended learning outcome was to let participants understand basic principles and apply imaging techniques required for clinical practice. Being familiar with these imaging techniques and making use of them is essential for radiological technologists. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the course has been transitioned to online teaching. However, the lecture-based teaching followed by the conventional midterm/final exam failed to develop student’s critical thinking and teamwork skills for the clinical environment. Furthermore, the one-way teaching approach highly reduced students’ engagement, especially in online courses. Accordingly, the speaker has redesigned this course by applying interactive design and technology-enhanced learning. Kirkwood and Price stress that technology-enhanced learning with an appropriate setup can induce changes in how university teachers teach and learners learn, resulting in the enhancement of learning outcomes¹. Technologies also enable student-centered learning and practices by providing an efficient environment for information retrieval, exchange, and generation². Biggs and Tang emphasize that "what and how students learn depends to a major extent on how they think they will be assessed", and therefore, the assessment tasks must align with the intended learning outcomes as the authentic representation³. Accordingly, the speaker adjusted the assessment by increasing the weighting of course participation from 10% to 40% and assessed students' performance in small group discussions during the online course. In order to effectively assess the results of the discussions and facilitate the sharing and feedback, an online co-creation environment, Miro, was used to foster critical thinking through technology-enhanced learning. The student activities and discussions recorded at Miro have further become important information for students’ review and teacher evaluations.
After taking this course, students started their clinical practicum in teaching hospitals for 7 months. Feedback was then collected from students and their clinical instructors: "Do you think the course helped you/students perform better during the clinical practicum". Students expressed that: "I blend in the clinical environment smoothly thanks to the course design and activities". Clinical instructors also gave positive feedback that students equipped required skills for medical imaging and communication in clinical practice. In summary, by implementing the interactive learning approach aligned with the intended learning outcomes in online courses, students can achieve the goal of developing clinically required skills.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the Veterans General Hospitals and University System of Taiwan Joint Research Program (VGHUST113-G1-2-3).