Introduction
This is the fifth and final instalment of my reflections on my experience with online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic of the 2020/21 academic year. This reflection considers the course AUBIO/AUCHE 280 - Biochemistry: Proteins, Enzymes & Energy which I taught in the winter term of 2021. Links to my previous reflections may be found at this link here.
I have taught Biochemistry: Proteins, Enzymes & Energy a total of 23 times since 1994 on the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. The Augustana Campus is the rural undergraduate liberal arts and sciences campus of a large research university whose primary campus (among five) is in Edmonton, the capital of Alberta. Edmonton is an hour northwest of Camrose where the Augustana Campus is located. Augustana has a small student population (1100) relative to the rest of the university (40,000).
AUBIO/AUCHE 280 is the first of two biochemistry courses that we teach on the Augustana campus. This first biochemistry course reviews the chemical properties of water upon which students are able to build an understanding of amino acid behaviour within cells and as components of proteins. This is critical for students to understand the properties of enzymes and how they are able to regulate metabolism. The course then uses these principles of enzyme regulation to explore the central pathways of cellular metabolism: glycolysis, citric acid cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation. The second biochemistry course we teach at Augustana is AUBIO/AUCHE 381 - Biochemistry: Intermediary Metabolism which picks up where AUBIO/AUCHE 280 ended by completing the exploration of cellular metabolism: gluconeogenesis, pentose phosphate pathway, and the metabolism of lipids, amino acids, and nucleotides.
My reflection on teaching biochemistry during the winter 2021 term relies on my own personal experience, students' feedback from the end of term student ratings of instruction (SRI), the SoTL literature I have read, and advice that I have received from my colleagues. These are the four lenses that Stephen Brookfield (2017) advocates should inform any critical reflection of teaching:
- students' eyes
- colleagues' perceptions
- personal experience of the instructor
- theory (the SoTL literature)
Methods & Materials
The course syllabus for the Winter 2021 iteration of AUBIO/AUCHE 280 is available at this link here. Briefly, students' grades were based on two midterm exams (20% each), a final exam (35%), a video assignment (10%) and homework (15%) that was assigned through the Achieve website that accompanied the required textbook for this course, Biochemistry, 9/e by Berg et al (2019). The video assignment consisted of students providing a recorded voice-over of animations that lacked sound which explained particular biochemical phenomena being studied in the course. The assignment of Achieve homework was a new course requirement implemented for the first time in 2021.
In this blog post, I use the SRIs (student ratings of instruction) that I received that term as the lens of students' experiences placing them in the context of others I have received over the years. I have posted the details of Augustana's SRIs in a previous blog post linked here. Note that the student comments below in the Results section are in response to four open-ended questions inviting students to type their comments into our online SRI survey:
- What aspects of the course and/or instructor did you find most valuable?
- What aspects of the course and/or instructor did you find least valuable?
- How useful were the course textbook(s) and/or other learning support materials?
- Please add any other comments that you would like to make about the course and/or instructor.
Results
Over the years students have fairly consistently rated this course and how I teach it very well. There are a couple of statistically significant differences indicated for the cohorts in winter 2018 and 2021 that I note in the results below.
Students' perceptions of the instructor
Instructor overall
Students in my biochemistry class have consistently well-rated my excellence as an instructor (mean = 4.4). ANOVA did not find any significant differences among the different cohorts of students (𝛼 = 0.05).
- Dr. Haave was always willing to answer questions related to the course material.
- The instructor overall was excellent
- Dr. Haave is a great instructor and very knowledgeable! I enjoy taking his classes!
- [I found most valuable to be the] course video
- I liked that all the asynchronous lectures were posted at the start of the semester so that if I had a busy week coming I could get ahead before hand.
- I found this course to be very well planned and the instructor was very helpful.
- [The team apps] can help fix loose ends you may have or point out important concepts.
- One of the problems I personally had (might be a me problem exclusively) is that trying to make correlations to other fields was sometimes difficult, but the breakdown Dr Haave would give made it easy to understand in hindsight.
- I liked the use of achieve and the homework assignments
- [I found most valuable the] Achieve website quizzes.
- [I found most valuable the] 2 stage exam
- I liked the homework assignments and thought they were good practice.
- The textbook and achieve website were very useful in this course.
- Dr. Haave was always willing to ask questions and never made you feel stupid.
Students' perceptions of the course structure & material
- I found every aspect of the course valuable
- The team apps, though quite hard sometimes, are great for applying your learning.
- the course was demanding and took up more time than all my other courses
- It is a tough course overall
Students' perceptions of their own experience
- I found the group applications most valuable because they allowed for group interaction and discussion about the material being learned.
- I really enjoyed working on the video assignment (even though I'm not great with video editing).
- a fun learning experience
- After taking this course I found my knowledge in a field that I had zero knowledge on expanded greatly as the course was streamlined and the videos provided gave a lot of insight on what we needed to know.
Student concerns
Discussion
Although students' responses to my teaching and the course I had prepared for them were somewhat weaker than in previous terms, it was still overall well-received by students in the winter 2021 term. I knew that the winter 2021 offering of AUBIO/AUCHE 280 - Biochemistry: Proteins, Enzymes & Energy was not going to be as good of a learning experience as in previous years because I did not have sufficient time to solve the problem of academic dishonesty during online exams, quizzes and applications of learning that I had observed in the previous fall 2020 term with AUBIO 111 - Integrative Biology I and AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology. Please do not misunderstand me: there were only a handful of students who unfairly took advantage of the online learning situation in fall 2020; most students learned with academic integrity. Still, it is incumbent upon the instructor to ensure that students are being assessed equitably in an environment where no student receives an unfair advantage. The only way I was able to ensure equitable assessment for all students in the winter 2021 term was to pre-Google every online question that contributed to students' final grades. I was able to do that for the MT and final exams but not for in-class (via Zoom) applications of students' learning. As a result, I was unable to implement TBL as the instructional strategy as students had experienced in courses that I had taught in previous terms. In addition, I also used our university's in house developed exam proctoring software, ExamLock which takes periodic snapshots of students' desktop and sends an alert to the online proctor when students browse to another window on their desktop.
What did I learn? What will I do differently?
Students appreciate and benefit from the online homework websites that many publishers make available with the adoption of their textbooks for a course. I tried this for the first time in the previous fall 2020 term, using Mastering Biology for AUBIO 111 and Smartwork5 for AUBIO 230. For AUBIO/AUCHE 280 I used the Achieve homework website that accompanied the textbook I had adopted for the course (Biochemistry, 9/e by Berg et al, 2019) which has been shown to improve student learning outcomes and is viewed favourably by students (McWilliams & Bergin, 2020; McWilliams et al, 2020). I decided to implement these online homework websites for my courses in the 2020/21 academic year to increase the feedback that students would receive as they practised their learning. I was concerned that this would be lacking in the online learning environment that existed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of my students commented that they appreciated the practice of applying their learning through Achieve. I will use publisher's homework websites again in the future.
Unlike the previous term in which I implemented TBL as the instructional strategy for AUBIO 111 - Integrative Biology I and AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology, I did not do the same for the winter 2021 offering of AUBIO/AUCHE 280 - Biochemistry. As I already stated above, this was because any online question that was assessed for contribution to students' final grades had to be pre-Googled and I simply did not have the time to do that for each and every App that I had prepared for F2F teaching. Instead, I used class time to meet with students online over Zoom to answer any of their questions. Many students used that time to either read the textbook pages I had assigned or view the video recorded minilectures I had prepared during the preceding summer of 2020. But many students showed up without questions hoping that others would ask questions for them. After a couple of weeks, online attendance over Zoom declined but a core of approximately 10 students continued to show up for Zoom classes. I offered to put students into random breakout rooms to attempt the Apps I had prepared using Google Forms but without the marks being recorded. This turned out to be a good learning experience for the students who did show up. But a couple of students did comment on the SRI that they felt little incentive to continue showing up for class when the marks were not contributing toward their final grade. In the future, when I again implement TBL for this course I will have students do a couple of Apps each class that do not contribute toward their final grade and then end the class meeting with one that does for which I have pre-Googled the exercise to ensure that it is not possible to copy and paste and answer after a simple Google search (I can usually complete 2-3 Apps in a one hour class). A study has found that implementing Apps without the mark contributing to students' final grades does not negatively impact student learning outcomes and is preferred by students (Deardorff et al, 2014) yet some students indicate that they will not show up for the class if the work completed in-class does not contribute to their final grade. I wish there had been time for me to prepare to mix it up like this (most not for marks, one per class for marks) for biochemistry in winter 2021.
Two-stage tests during MT exams
Two-stage testing has been found to improve student learning outcomes (Mahoney & Harris-Reeves, 2019). However, in this course the response from students toward this testing strategy was mixed. This is an interesting result because when I used two-stage testing for the Readiness Assurance Tests (RATs) when TBL is the teaching strategy, the student response has been predominantly positive. I believe the difference in response is that in the winter 2021 term, the two-stage testing was used for high stakes MT exams instead of for low stakes RATs. Also, unlike two-stage testing for RATs in which students spend most of their time on the team portion of the quiz, for higher stakes exams, it is the individual portion of the two-stage quiz for which students require more time. My experience suggests that the time allocation is different depending upon whether the test is formative or summative. If it is formative the allocation is 1 part individual to 2 parts team; if it is summative it is 2 parts individual to 1 part team. This is my sense based on winter 2021 vs the preceding terms which implemented TBL in biochemistry. My colleagues have suggested this may be because students are less prepared for the formative quizzes (i.e., students are still learning the material - they have only just experienced the new course material in the assigned pre-class reading or video) vs being better prepared for the summative exams (i.e., students have spent more time and repeated time with the material being examined). Thus, more time is required during the team portion of a 2-stage exam/quiz that is formative in nature because there is more student discussion. In contrast during a summative 2-stage exam, students are more sure of their understanding and thus the team discussion does not require as much time. I have not yet found a peer-reviewed paper that analyzes this issue.
What happened in 2018 and 2021?
This biochemistry course is one of my favourite courses to teach and is typically very well received by students despite its perceived difficulty and workload. So what happened in 2018 and 2021 in which the SRIs are lower for some of the survey prompts (i.e., contact time was used effectively, instructor communicated effectively, quality of course content).
Winter 2018 was the 2nd term of Augustana's first year of implementation of our new term structure in which students completed one course during the first three weeks of the term and then completed their other four courses during the subsequent 11 weeks of the term. I think students (and instructors!) were still adjusting to that change and it impacted some of the ratings for that term though perhaps not as much as it affected the SRIs for Molecular Cell Biology in the preceding fall 2017 term.
I did not use TBL as the instructional strategy in 2021 for AUBIO 280 because I had not yet solved the problem of academic dishonesty in an online environment. The solution required pre-Googling all online assignments, quizzes, and exams and I only found the time to do that for the exams. As a result, many students did not avail themselves of the practice time that I provided them to apply their learning because the in-class (via Zoom) Apps were no longer for marks that contributed toward their final grade. I simply did not have adequate time to prepare for this in the transition from F2F to online teaching.
But why did the W2021 cohort rate my effective use of class time significantly differently from cohorts W2006 to F2012 and W2020 but not from the cohorts in W2017 through to 2019? I think the answer is that I started using TBL consistently as the instructional strategy after F2012 and that although students' learning outcomes improve with TBL (Liu & Beaujean, 2017), students may not perceive the instructional time (i.e., in-class or over Zoom) to be as well utilized as when class time is used for lecturing (Lane, 2008) similar to what has been found in other active learning classes (Deslauriers, et al, 2019; Van Sickle, 2017; Smith & Cardaciotto, 2011). However, when implemented well, most students will respond well to active learning (Finelli et al, 2018).
Based on the graphs in the Results section above, it appears (i.e., a nonsignificant trend) to me that my ability to implement TBL in AUBIO/AUCHE 280 - Biochemistry: Proteins, Enzymes & Energy was improving prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. What might be improving students' reception of TBL in this biochemistry course? Some of the things that I was starting to do are well-articulated suggestions in the article by Finelli et al (2018). My method of canvassing students' team responses during their in-class apps when we were meeting F2F was to use QuickKey which uses QR codes on cards that are quickly scanned by instructor's smartphones or tablets. It is an ingenious system (note that the app also enables smartphones and tablets to grade MCQ tests similar to a scantron) but requires instructors to remain visible at the front of the class in order to scan the QR cards. This limits instructors' ability to walk among student teams to offer encouragement and advice while the teams work on the assigned applications of learning. Between 2012 and 2021 I became better at interacting with student teams in a specified time before returning to the front of the class to scan the QR codes. A simple thing to do in principle but something that I need to be intentional about - it took practice for me to do well.
A final consideration is the room that I teach in (the physical space) can impact how students learn (Cotner, et al, 2013; Park & Choi, 2014). I started teaching in Augustana's active learning classroom (ALC) in 2017. In contrast to the traditional lecture theatre, our ALC is designed around pods of tables at which is located a large computer screen/whiteboard. This allows students to work in teams facing each other across a common table while at the same time viewing what I am presenting on the screen. In addition, the whiteboard ability of the screens at each pod enables students to work on group problems that I assign during class. This is an excellent design for active learning and teamwork. A drawback of Augustana's ALC is that there are two wings that float above the main floor of the classroom that house 4 pods of students (6 students to a pod). When the number of students seated on the main floor exceeds its limit (approximately 48) then the overflow goes upstairs into these wings where the sight lines between the student and the instructor are poor. It took me a couple of years to learn that the best way to deal with student enrolments greater than 48 in this ALC was to rotate the student teams through the different learning pods such that no one team was relegated to the weaker learning environment in those upstairs wings for the entire term. When the situation is explained to students along with its pros and cons students come on board with the learning environment. When well-implemented, this is an excellent learning space.
Resources
Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
