Author: caked834

**Long Post Alert**

I enjoyed the readings for this week’s class as they provided clarity into what I was trying to achieve in my online classroom. Over the years, I have learned and applied different engagement strategies, however, my attempts to engage the students within an interactive online environment were not always as successful as I would like.
Completing the readings made me realize that what was missing was community. Yes! This is what I was trying to achieve…. the sense of community. Without being intentional about building a class community was a missed opportunity to properly engage the learners. Making this commitment as an educator means being mindful to who is in your class, and creating interactions that foster relationship building.
How could I have missed that!?

Continue reading “Building Community in a blended learning environment”

Background information

Radiation therapy is a common cancer treatment that uses high-energy x-rays to kill cancer cells or stop them from growing and dividing. It’s a localized treatment, meaning it targets specific areas of the body where cancer cells are present while minimizing damage to healthy surrounding tissue. The treatments are individually designed for each person’s anatomy and treatment target area; thus precision is required to deliver the planned dose. There are many factors that contribute to differences between the planned dose and the delivered dose. One such factor is reproducibility in patient position on the treatment unit. Patient positioning is crucial  in radiation therapy because it ensures accurate delivery of radiation to the targeted area while minimizing exposure to surrounding healthy tissues.

To ensure accurate patient positioning, image matching happens prior to each treatment and is performed while the patient is laying on the treatment couch waiting for the radiation beam to start. This is called Image Guided Radiation Therapy, or IGRT. Image matching in short, is looking at the image from the original “planned” treatment and matching it to the daily image of the patient on the treatment couch, the discrepancies are noted, bed movements are entered into the software which results in the patient moving to a position that matches the planned treatment image. Cross-sectional anatomy is included in the foundation of successfulimage matching. Acquiring and improving this skill is important to the success of the patient’s treatment as it is imperative that image matching is done in a time sensitive manner, to avoid any further patient movements. This course presents the function and application of Computed Tomography (CT) in the context of IGRT. The overarching goal is to provide students with a solid understanding of cross-sectional anatomy and its significance as it applies to IGRT.

The target audience for this course is adult learners who have chosen to work in health care. They have a minimum of two years undergraduate prerequisite courses as well as some radiation therapy course prerequisites. Information in these pre-requisite courses include how CTscanners and Linear Accelerators work, 2D- radiographic anatomy and how knowledge of the lymphatic system is applied in radiation therapy.

The learners in this type of program are usually young adults with a wide variety of lived experiences. Academically speaking, some come directly from completing the required 2 years of undergrad courses, and others with a variety of type and number of degrees. In other ways, some have not yet left the family home, some have children, some have done extensive travelling, some are changing careers. Some have worked in hospitals; some have never been inside a hospital.

Continue reading “Course Profile for Cross Sectional Anatomy for IGRT in Radiation Therapy”

Completing the readings after making my first two blog posts makes me realize that I am thinking differently already. It’s interesting to me that I did not think about the LMS I use (Desire2Learn/BrightSpace) as part of blended learning. Thinking about it though, I do post discussion topics, quizzes are done through the LMS, assignments are handed in and delivered back through the LMS, I post practice activities, reminders and other prompts through the LMS.

During the pandemic, like most of the world, I had to quickly move to remote learning (aka emergency remote learning). The course I teach is quite formula heavy with a lot of new concepts, which I demonstrate visually usually on the board. Without time to adapt my teaching modality, I had to quickly borrow hardware (Wacom monitor) and learn how to use Zoom functions such as the white board etc. Once my desk was set up, the rest was fairly easy. Additional challenges were almost exclusively on the students side, such as finding a space in a crowded home, sharing computer time with siblings, and bandwidth issues.

I enjoyed the article Old wine in new Bottles, and what really landed with me was that course design needs to adapt to the different environment, the new online environment. As it state, online learning puts the students in a space that is different than the face-to-face classroom. I find in the classroom it is the collaboration and ‘work together’ time that not only solidifies certain concepts, but it is here that gaps in knowledge are recognized and can be addressed and discussed as a group. New ways of achieving this need to be adopted if using an online model.

A question is posed in 10.5 The future of the campus – Teaching in a Digital Age – Second Edition (bccampus.ca). The authors say state that what we need to be asking is “what is the academic or pedagogical justification for the campus, when students can learn most things online?”. They go on to assert that on-campus activities must be meaningful.

Perhaps part of my answer to this question lies in my constructivist view and thoughts on collaboration.

Before I start this course, I wanted to spend a few minutes reflecting on what digital technology meant and how it is changing. Prior to 2020, digital content in my classroom meant saving larger files on the shared drive to save paper. It meant delivering the class content via PowerPoint and demonstrating examples on the white board. This picture is not my classroom, but it is surprisingly similar. Just like the instructor of this classroom, I had a tiny space of white board available behind the podium to the left of the screen to do physics equations, draw pictures of diverging radiation beams and stick figure patients. Utilizing more whiteboard space meant rolling up the screen, then pulling it down to continue with the slides – covering up the example I just drew on the board!

It wasn’t ideal but we made it work. I am sure the instructor of this classroom and I could have a very animated conversation about the limitations of this setup 🙂 Another piece of technology I incorporated into my lessons was the iClicker. There are newer tools to engage students, but it worked well, and allowed me to assess the level of knowledge transfer. The pandemic forced us all to learn quickly and change our teaching methods to deliver the same content over an online platform, Zoom in my case.  How do we deliver quizzes? How do we uphold the integrity of the test material? Eventually solutions to these challenges emerged.

Technology in the classroom is a permanent fixture. Our world is much smaller now, the global landscape is very different, and in response, the way humans interact with each other, and the world has evolved. I am old enough to remember the pre-internet days, I have been a witness to this evolution.

Subscribers to constructivism will argue that face to face learning cannot be completely replaced. However, the practical benefits of online learning cannot be denied.  Beyond the practical, there are other benefits to using technology in the classroom.

Before diving into EC&I 834, I wanted to reflect on the benefits that technology has brought into my own adult classroom. Hopefully this will provide a “before and after” overview of my level of knowledge and beliefs towards technology and the adult classroom.

Within the first week of teaching over Zoom, I noticed an increase in student engagement. My adult classroom is very small (less than 10 students each year) and every year the class has a different dynamic. The class that started in 2020 was particularly quiet, and I had a hard time engaging them individually, with the exception of the iClickers which provided anonymous responses.  Even trying to get information about what they did over the weekend was like pulling teeth!

However, once I started teaching, students were asking questions in a private chat box. I was thrilled! Having the chance to correct misunderstandings or clarify difficult concepts prior to moving on is very important when building the foundations of a new concept, a new way of thinking, and a new way of applying mathematical concepts. I use these opportunities to customize in class review questions, targeting specific learning barriers.

I found that online learning also made using the “Flipped classroom” strategy more palatable for the students. They were better prepared for our synchronous online classes, and I could use our time towards applied learning.

It was interesting having this particular, very quiet, class as the first to teach over Zoom. It seemed to me that the differences in the teaching/learning environments were amplified. Another example. During in person classes, I often broke the students into small groups to work together to solve a particular problem. Collaboration leads to richer educational experiences. This class, however, would sit in groups of 2 or 3, and quietly work on their own.  What I found was, when I used breakout rooms in Zoom, they would actually work together, which also resulted in increased engagement, developing their critical thinking skills.

These are just a few examples of the benefits to switching to Zoom for this particular classroom. Although, I still hold on to my belief that there are benefits to face-to-face learning that cannot be met by the online platform. I found it more challenging to place the lessons into a real-world context. As I instruct future healthcare providers, the social context is very important.