The Role of Technology in Anatomy Teaching: Striking the Right Balance (original) (raw)
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Education in the Digital Age: Technological Trends in Anatomy Education
2019
New developments in medicine and health sciences produced high volume knowledge. However, the more knowledge led to narrowing in duration of anatomy education given to students. For this reason, it may be useful for teachers who teach anatomy to use alternative learning strategies and alternative educational tools, including today’s interactive digital technologies, to enhance the effectiveness of anatomy teaching. This research is a literature review study. In order to reveal the current situation and to make it better understandable, the research is based on the review of the literature. In this study, it is observed that use of interactive digital technologies in anatomy education is insufficient and no so widespread. Therefore, the aim of this study is to reveal the significance of interactive digital technologies that can be used in anatomy education. In accordance with this aim, the study mentioned about some important digital technologies and teaching strategies such as flipp...
Exploring the use of a digital anatomy learning platform in a second-year medical student cohort
Anatomical Sciences Education, 2024
Globally, anatomy is considered a foundational medical science that is taught to the majority of health professionals, generally within the early years of their undergraduate studies. Anatomical sciences are fundamental in assisting students in understanding the structure of the typical human body and are widely considered to be the cornerstone of medicine. 1 Although anatomy has been taught for many years, the methods for teaching have remained largely the same, consisting mainly
The Efficiency of Digital Anatomy Teaching Strategies
Journal of Nursing & Healthcare, 2020
Background: In medical school, the teaching of anatomy is both time-consuming and complicated. As more schools allot less time to this subject, there is a growing need to restructure anatomy teaching methodologies. This paper examines digital dissection resources and identifies how and when they were implemented in the classroom. Methods: An online survey tool was sent to osteopathic medical schools throughout the United States to determine the resources and methods being used and to assess how students were performing in corresponding anatomy courses. The anatomy director at each school was given a predetermined set of questions to enable an evaluation of the curriculum and performance of the students. Results: After data were collected from the medical schools, the results were analyzed and indicated that the use of digital anatomy resources resulted in better overall performance and grades. Conclusion: Although the small sample size precluded proper hypothesis testing, several st...
2019
Teaching anatomy has traditionally been restricted to didactic lectures and cadaveric dissection, where students are required to rote learn, without focus on analysis, conceptualisation, and clinical reasoning. A shift in pedagogical practices has occurred with rapidly developing online technologies now embedded within many university degree programs. Anatomy education has evolved to include new teaching modalities, such as computer-assisted learning including the use of 2D images or 3D models, web-based interactive games, virtual reality, augmented simulation, and haptics. Dissection courses have been found to be time-consuming and expensive, and in many universities, time committed to teaching is on the decline, there are increased costs associated with running body donation programs, and larger student numbers have led to fewer laboratory sessions available to students for learning. This chapter focuses on the use of digital atlases as a useful supplement to teaching anatomy in not only medical but all the allied health professions.
BMC Medical Education
Background: The importance of mobile phones has become one of the new research topics in health professions education due to the ease of access and flexibility. Although novel approaches to health professions education recommend the use of educational technologies, such as mobile applications, a limited number of studies have been conducted with regard to learning anatomy through mobile applications. Considering the increasing needs of medical students for mobile technology to meet their educational needs, wants and desires, we decided to explore the features of an anatomy mobile application. Methods: This qualitative study was conducted in two stages of holding focus groups, and an expert panel session. Students of basic Medical sciences, and faculty members of anatomy at Iran University of Medical Sciences formed the research participants. Semi-structured interviews and note-taking were used to collect the data. Moreover, Brown and Clark methods were used for thematic analysis. Finally, four criteria presented by Lincoln and Guba for qualitative studies were used to ensure the credibility, confirmability, trustworthiness and transferability of the data. Results: Based on the data analysis, 37 codes that could be used to design anatomy mobile content for medical students were extracted. These features were categorized into eight main themes of "visual richness", "scientific comprehensiveness", "auditory richness", "affordability", "user-friendliness", "self-assessment", "interactive content" and "user support". Conclusion: This study explored the features of an anatomy application that can be used by educational app developers. Anatomy departments at Medical Universities, policymakers, and curriculum planners in the field of medical education can also adopt the findings of the present study.
COVID-19 pandemic has created a lot of turmoil in medical teaching, the magnitude of impact is many folds in the subject of anatomy, as it is practical based. A major challenge for anatomy teachers is to replicate the experience of practical exposures. These exposures range from cadaveric dissection to demonstration of bones, museum specimens, and histology slides, where they will have interactive communication with students, and thus help in the enhancement of communication and clinical skills among them. In recent days, anatomy teachers throughout the globe started using various advanced technology to make the teaching-learning session more interesting. In pre-pandemic era, usage of such advancements in information and communication technology was a 'choice'. But pandemic has changed the situation drastically, what was a 'choice' earlier is now an 'obligation.' Presently although infection rate is low, vaccination rate is high, most of the medical schools reopened for usual offline teaching, still body donation is all time low making the situation 'back to square one'. Keeping such unprecedented situations in mind, we need to incorporate various innovative educational technologies in day-today teaching-learning methodologies.
Modernising Anatomy Teaching: Which Resources Do Students Rely On?
Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development, 2020
The way in which we learn anatomy has changed exponentially over the decades and students now have access to lecture notes, textbooks, computer-assisted programmes, and a wide variety of internet based information. This study explored which resources were the most (and least) useful for a group of first year, undergraduate, medical students, with minimal prior content exposure (aged 18 and 19 years old, n = 76), over an 18 month period. Anatomy websites were found to be the most useful (30%), followed by tutorials (20%) and lectures (19%). A total of 13% found the university computer-assisted learning (CAL) platform least useful. We subsequently enhanced our ‘urogenital’ CAL anatomy module, with inclusion of new and updated images, videos and tutorials, as well as, digital and printed 3D-models. A post-intervention survey (n = 81) showed an increase from 12% to 27% for CAL as being most useful, and a decrease from 13% to 3% as being least useful. Our results provided a snapshot of s...
Do mobile learning devices enhance learning in higher education anatomy classrooms
Journal of pedagogic development, 2015
Recently there has been an increased volume of research and practice of mobile Learning (mLearning) and in particular of the tablet device. The question of how, when and where to best incorporate the tablet device into the learning environment in Higher Education remains largely unanswered. The article presents the findings of an empirical study that examined the effect of integrating mobile learning tablet devices into first year University anatomy seminars in a group of Sport and Exercise students. Data on student achievement, attendance and feedback was collected over two academic years and two cohorts, comparing seminar groups taught with tablet devices (iPads) integrated with traditionally taught anatomy seminars. The results indicate that the iPads had a positive effect on attendance, achievement and progression, highlighting the need for a framework as to how the tablet should be incorporated to maximise the learner experience. This article offers insight into the implicati...
International Journal of Anatomy and Research, 2020
Traditionally, the methods used in learning anatomy are based on the use of textbooks, 2D diagrams and dissection sessions meanwhile the human body is three dimensional (3D). However, students who have low-spatial ability have difficulties in understanding the structures in 3D space and finding muscles, nerves, and organs during dissection. Many students also experience discomfort with the use of cadavers in the dissecting room which has been considered to bring about a barrier to the teaching and learning of anatomy. Mobile devices allow students to have access to learning materials and information at their convenience, thus referred to as mobile learning or individualized learning which is integrated with anytime and anywhere learning. The study of anatomy is perceptible to the sense of touch and with the incorporation of "anatomy apps" on mobile devices, there is possibility of high level of interactivity whereby users can either rotate, flip, enlarge or reduce three dimensional anatomical structures to get a better understanding of these structures. This study was aimed at developing and evaluating an interactive 3D e-learning resource tool for study of the anatomy of the cervical vertebra. The ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation) model of instructional design was used in this study for the development of the resource tool and evaluation of the impact of the resource on the participants. 90% of the respondents favored the fact that the iBook is user friendly and easy to navigate, 93% agreed that the user interface, layout and appearance of the iBook is well organized. 75% agreed that the written content of the e-learning tool provides appropriate knowledge for the study of the region. 80% of the respondents strongly agreed that the tool is a helpful educational tool for medical students, 80% of the respondents also agreed that the tool compliments the medical curriculum and 85% strongly supported that fact the tool is flexible and saves reading time. The e-learning resource tool produced as can serve as a teaching and a learning aid in the study of human anatomy and improve the teaching and learning process in general as it combines education and entertainment thereby, making anatomy a lot more intuitive.