The courses you take are important; not only for your knowledge as a medical professional, but as a student trying to retain mass amounts of information.
We strive to make every class as efficient and relevant as possible. Using past survey data, we made the following improvements as part of our effort to make IU the best medical school in the country.
In response to both student and faculty feedback, the Course Management Team has improved and updated their course materials. The Course Management Team has revised eight small group sessions and re-recorded eleven lectures, including pulmonary physiology and pathology lectures. Virtual microscopy sessions have been embedded into small group materials. The team improved the audio on selected renal physiology lectures. We are continuing to have two exams during the physiology section of the course. Student performance improved from previous years compared to having a single exam over the three-week period. While this increases the number of exams in the course, it removes having a single high stakes exam over half of the course (physiology). New practice questions with answers and explanations have been added to all blocks of the course.
We have updated a learning objective to address a gap in course content to go beyond explaining the basic principles of immunization: Explain the basic principles of immunization and discuss ways to support informed vaccine decision making.
To improve the structure and timing of both the autoimmunity (block 1) and immunodeficiencies (block 3) sessions, several changes have been made to the sessions:
Students will no longer give presentations during these sessions. Instead, after a brief pre-work video and introductory material, students will research key facts on each disease, focusing on disease mechanisms. The group will then review a series of brief cases to identify the diseases described.
To make the time more manageable, the set of diseases is now split between two sessions instead of covering all diseases on the first day and recapping on the second day.
To avoid overwhelming students with a lot of new material right before the exam, the autoimmunity session in week 2 has been moved up by one day. This change provides students with two full days free of in-class activities to study for exam 1.
To give students more time to complete the SDL activity and prepare a good presentation, HIV day 1 has been moved up by one day, while day 2 remains in its original place. This adjustment gives students two days to work on the activity.
All small group activities have been reviewed by a group of infectious disease physicians and updated accordingly.
Links have been added for students to give feedback on each session in the course, rather than just the lectures.
Based on last year’s feedback, several modifications have been made to this year’s N&B course, including:
Revised course schedule — all required work is now listed on the schedule. In addition, students told us that the time allotted for gross anatomy lab sessions was too short, so it's been increased from 2 to 3 hours.
Revamped statewide pre-recorded lectures — all lectures were reviewed and/or revised based on student and faculty feedback and in accordance with MSE guidelines.
Presentation of surface anatomy has been enhanced in gross anatomy lectures to facilitate integration with physical exam skills taught in Foundations of Clinical Practice 1 course.
A new Block 3 Introduction to Skull and Cranial Nerves lecture has been created to provide students with a more complete overview of head and neck structures prior to viewing the lectures on specific head and neck regions.
Revamped histology lab practice PowerPoints — now better aligned with lecture content and streamlined the practice of identifying histology structures.
Revised gross anatomy laboratory resources and guidance on use of resources.
Changed the 'structures to know' lists and dissection instructions for Block 2.
Adopted Grant’s Dissector as the official dissection instructions for gross anatomy labs. Lab-associated chapters have been linked to the gross anatomy lab Canvas module pages and are also available as an eBook at the Lilly library.
Prosection videos are provided as an overview of structures that will be dissected in lab. The videos are not intended to provide dissection instructions.
Peer-teaching guides are provided to give students instructions on what should be covered during peer-teaching sessions.
A document describing these resources and how best to use them to prepare for gross labs and enhance learning of gross anatomy is provided on the Introduction to Gross Anatomy Lab Canvas Module page.
Revised Introduction to Anatomical Donors session. This was a new session last year that was very well received by students. We have made some revisions to enhance the session for its second iteration, including reducing the amount of out-of-class pre-work, streamlining the in-class discussions, and creating a new donor and donor family perspectives video.
Review of dissection groups A vs. B effort distribution
A Qualtrics survey of HS faculty (n=11) was conducted in which faculty estimated the effort required to complete the dissections for each lab on a scale of 1-5 (1=lowest effort, 5=highest effort).
All students dissect during the first gross anatomy lab. Thereafter, each group is responsible for completing dissections during 12 labs. Estimated average effort for group A vs. B labs was nearly identical (3.55 vs. 3.54). Additionally, both groups were responsible for completing the dissections for five labs that received effort ratings above 3.5; Based on these results, we believe that the dissection effort between groups A and B has been equitably distributed.
New student-created, faculty/graduate student/medical student-curated, HS course-specific Anki Deck — we're excited to bring students this new customized HS-specific Anki deck.
New Gross Anatomy and Embryology Q Bank with over 500 practice questions — this will allow students to practice applying gross anatomy and embryology content.
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Additional resources were created in the following content areas:
Students are now given the opportunity to spend three consecutive nights with an admitting pediatrics resident. The purpose of this experience is to ensure students gain exposure to the clinical setting in the evenings and overnight. Two of the nights focus on admissions and staffing patients while one night focuses on cross cover.
