EPLE+in+Oral+Health

An Oral Health Story: Sophie Karanicolas & Cathy Snelling
We are lecturers in the Bachelor of Oral Health (BOH) at the University of Adelaide, a program that has traditionally operated in face-to-face mode. Our discipline has struggled over the years to engage all of our students in the study of human biology. Students enter the program with very diverse backgrounds - some with no previous biology experience, some having already studied aspects of it at tertiary level. So delivering a traditional lecture to this audience was a challenging task, given the wide range of understandings that they were bringing to class. We looked therefore to find a way of ensuring that all students could arrive at the face-to-face sessions with a good grounding in the key concepts and the associated terminologies.

** What did we do? **
We developed what we have termed //Interactive Online Learning Modules// (IOLMs). We took the PowerPoint presentations for key topics in the program. We then processed these through the Articulate program, and added in audio narration, together with short interactive quizzes, which we refer to as //checkpoints//, at critical learning points. The quizzes were linked into our university's learning management system (an implementation of Blackboard). The resulting multimedia files were made available to students in a range of formats, for both desktop and mobile devices.

Checkpoints
Students needed to work through these self-paced modules, and to respond to the quiz questions, prior to the face-to-face sessions. We collated student responses to these checkpoints via the learning management system, enabling us to provide students with immediate feedback and at the same time to monitor their levels of understanding. Checkpoints took the form of multiple-choice questions and/or extended matching questions and appeared in each module every 4-5 slides.



Impact of face-to-face sessions
Students could preview and return to each slide as often as they needed to support the development of their understanding. As teachers we could then analyse the students pre-existing level of understanding by identifying poorly answered or misunderstood checkpoints. As our students were now prepared for the face-to-face sessions, we could now streamline these by focusing on the areas of greatest learning need and increasing the interactive nature of the session through meaningful peer group discussions and team based learning exercises.

What made this method a hit with our students?
Students valued the capacity to work through the modules in their own time and at their own pace, reviewing the material as often as required to establish their understandings. They also view the checkpoint/feedback facility as a critically important feature of the system in respect of ensuring that they were on the right track in their understandings.

The use of 'radio' voices
In addition, the narration was done in contemporary 'radio' style, rather than traditional lecture monologue mode, through a lively series of exchanges between the two principal lecturers. The dialogue incorporated investigative style questioning where one of assumed the role of the expert and the other played the role of a novice learner, asking questions that students normally ask in this subject, and anticipating misconceptions that students typically fall into. This was supplemented with a rich use of analogies and summaries to highlight the key learning concepts, as well as using the narrative to create a sense of familiarity with new terms students encountered.

**What the students themselves say about our approach**
Watch this [|video] to hear our student testimonials. media type="youtube" key="DeSjwg4BYFs?fs=1" height="385" width="640"