Category: EC&I 834

I had no idea what to expect when I signed up for this class. I knew I enjoyed online learning, and I was excited to learn “how to do it right”. I am so happy with all the content we learning this term and I am excited to bring it into action.

My course prototype at the moment is on my wish list for the School of Radiation Therapy. I chose this topic because I believe it is something that should be incorporated into the current curriculum. I used the Canvas LMS, as it is simple, straightforward, and fairly similar to Brightspace which I have experience with. I kept the course design simple. Each week of the course covers one module. Each module has three sections: Didactic material, Extra resources, and Assessments. I am hopeful that this will be incorporated into the RT curriculum. Now that I have the first two modules done, it will be easier to get some buy-in from those who need to be convinced that this is a good thing to do. I am proud of my final course prototype, I feel it is conducive to adult learning while keeping the students engaged.

And well, if it doesn’t become a reality, I still have a new toolbox of skills to bring to my current class that I teach.

Continue reading “Final Blog Post for EC&I 834”

Until now, my experience with AI has primarily involved experimenting with ChatGPT by asking questions alongside a traditional internet search. I was able to see how AI synthesizes information compared to manually sifting through search engine results. I knew it was being used to complete complex tasks, but I had not looked into this as I did not realize it could influence my classroom, beyond figuring out if students are using it to cheat.

My interactions with ChatGPT only consisted of asking for information; it never occurred to me to ask it to do a job for me.

Continue reading “A-eyes Open”

*Title created by ChatGPT.

When AI first came to public awareness, there was a general fear amongst educators that student assessment might be compromised. It was immediately recognized that students would be able to use it to complete assignments, or at least make a large contribution to the content. What was not immediately known was how AI could help on the side of instruction. While these are separate topics, both require a great deal of attention.

My readings have revealed that Educators and Universities should embrace AI as it can assist with tutoring, task automation, course creation, etc. These discussions revolve around how to leverage this technology for course improvement and/or time savings. The larger discussion revolves around the use of AI by the students, particularly around assessments.

Continue reading “Educate.AI: A New Era in Learning”

“Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions”

– Ken Blanchard

This quote jumped out at me as I related to and agreed with the message, and thought it was appropriate for projects such as the one we are working on.  As I was inserting the quote into this blog post, I thought that I should find a definition of “Breakfast of Champions” to share to put it into context. This turned out to be a lot harder than I thought! People use this expression in many ways, not surprisingly mostly with sarcasm, and some were unexpected!

I finally found a definition that matched most closely to how I define this phrase, it came from definitions.net which cited ChatGPT:

breakfast of champions

Breakfast of champions is a phrase used to refer to a meal or food that is considered nourishing, substantial, or of high quality. It can also be used metaphorically to describe something that is regarded as the best or most important, particularly in the context of personal success, achievement, or excellence.

This is the context of the phrase in my mind when I related to Ken Blanchard’s quote above.

Continue reading “Feedback and Equity”

I am designing a blended learning course for adult learners to refresh and strengthen their knowledge of CT anatomy (also called cross-sectional anatomy). This means finding anatomical structures on images that were acquired with a CT scanner. Looking at images this way is quite different than what we think of as regular X-rays. I am using the LMS Canvas which has impressed me with its clean, simple, intuitive design and has many of the features of robust LMS. I organized the course content into modules, and embedded H5P content created in Lumi.  The first couple of modules of this course focus on refreshing the learner’s knowledge of CT images and 2D radiographs. Being comfortable with orientating oneself to the various views available and understanding anatomical directional terms that are used to describe locations provides a strong foundation for learning cross-sectional anatomy.

Continue reading “Module Introduction through Lumi”

**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.