During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers faced numerous ethical questions in biomedical science, public health, educational policy, and education practice. Bioethicists were key partners in informing decision-making in their areas of expertise; educational ethicists, on the other hand, had to fight our way to the table if…

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the engineering profession with the highest demand in 2021 is biomedical engineering (BME) (BLS, January 2021). Biomedical engineers combine engineering principles with medical and biological sciences to design and create equipment, devices, computer systems, and software used in healthcare (BLS, 2021).…

This academic position paper focuses on building a bridge between public health and science education in order to recognize the relationships between science and society--politics, economics, and ideology--in a pandemic context. To do this, we first present the contemporary dispute between the ways of understanding and explaining public health…

During the spring of 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was necessary to rapidly translate a new human-centered design studio course for first-year biomedical engineering students from a face-to-face delivery mode to a remote delivery mode. In addition to disrupting plans for hands-on design prototyping experiences, stay-at-home orders…

Dimensionality reduction techniques are essential in analyzing large 'omics' datasets in biochemistry and molecular biology. Principal component analysis, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding, and uniform manifold approximation and projection are commonly used for data visualization. However, these methods can be challenging for students…

Project-based learning (PBL) has been found to deepen learning and develop employability skills for students through active engagement with the learning materials. Foundation, first and second year Biomedical Science students at the University of Sussex were introduced to a PBL exercise. Each class had an approximate student to staff ratio of…

The transition to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the adaptation of an in-person cell culture lab practical to a virtual assessment in an introductory biomedical engineering lab course. The virtual lab practical was administered in the course LMS and implemented video, data analysis, and multiple-choice questions.…

While biomedical and life science research have embraced interdisciplinarity as the means to solving pressing 21st century complex challenges, interdisciplinarity in undergraduate education has been more difficult to implement. As a consequence, disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary capstones have become ubiquitous. Disciplinary capstones are…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities have switched to online learning platforms, which inhibits engineering students from completing formative hands-on experiments. To address this, we developed at-home experiments for an undergraduate biomaterials course. These inquiry-based learning experiments were well received by students and…

Temporary higher education institution closures in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic disrupted student teaching. This paper reports on the rapid conversion of an in person laboratory session to online delivery, within 24 h of the previously scheduled in person session, and two working days after the end of face-to-face teaching at the…

The teaching tip described here relates to a department level initiative to gather and act on student experiences in real-time during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Spring 2020 semester. The survey was developed to be an ongoing, department level, data collection source that could capture, triage, and react to student's unique situations as they…

In order to provide undergraduate students with a full, rich online learning experience we adapted pre-existing online content including graduate courses from Johns Hopkins University Engineering for Professionals (JHU EP) program. These online courses were designed using published methodologies and held to a high level of rigor of a Masters-level…

Confronted by the disruption of work-integrated learning (WIL) placements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Durban University of Technology experienced multiple academic and mental health challenges. This study highlights the impact the pandemic had on students from the Departments of Homeopathy,…

Amidst the dual challenges of an eight-month university closure from nationwide public university strikes in Nigeria and the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we needed to innovate the delivery of BME graduate curriculum to ensure graduate students continued to progress in their studies. To ensure BME graduate students were engaging in…

This paper describes the adaptation of a flipped Biomedical Electronics course with laboratories to remote learning at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In class collaborative work on problem sets was replaced by group work (4-5 students) in Zoom breakout sessions. When the groups assembled at random for each class had sufficiently progressed on…