Learning the basics cell biology and pathophysiology at the microscopical level with virtual slides and wikis

Posted on 28. Apr, 2011 by Antoinette Vesseur in Announcements, Assignments, eLearning, Faculty, FASoS, FHML, FHS, FL, FPN, Inner City, Practices, Randwyck, SBE, Staff, Students

At Maastricht University students in Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML) learn the basics cell biology and pathophysiology at the microscopical level in practical sessions that complement other learning activities in Problem-Based Learning. For these sessions ‘virtual slides’ are used, scanned tissue samples that can be browsed using Google-Earth-like facilities. Virtual slides and background information are implemented in an electronic learning environment. The lecturers were, however, concerned that the students’ learning remains superficial. In the PBL curriculum these practical sessions are dispersed over several modules and lecturers have noticed that students forget a lot in between. To achieve a deeper learning, students were asked to make a wiki using annotated screen-captures of the virtual microscopical slides. This provides more insight for the lecturer who can now assess the students’ work and see what students do during the practical sessions and during self-study for exams.

During the practical session students worked together in triads on assignments using virtual slides and presented the results in a wiki.

Persons involved: Approximately 60 biomedical students in their 3^rd year and 1 lecturer.

Tools: In the first experiment (2009) a separate electronic learning environment, Dokeos, was used, since the regular learning environment does not offer the required functionality. In 2010 the students made use of the wiki in Blackboard 9.1, available on the Learnplus project server.

Results: The use of a wiki is new for most of the students and they need some time to get used to it. Placing text in the wiki is comparatively easy, adding pictures is a little bit more complicated. For the teacher it is relatively easy to correct the wikis.

Investment: The Learnplus server was already available so only a limited investment in time had to be made in order to instruct students how to work with the Wiki.

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