Regulatory Sciences courses taught in an online asynchronous environment pose challenges for sustaining student engagement and encouraging active learning. Impediments include limited contact with the instructor and classmates, inadequate interaction with learning materials, content that can be ever-changing, and limited tools for assessing…

With a motivation to immerse students in engineering design, graphics communication, and computer aided design (CAD) skills early-on in the biomedical engineering curriculum, we launched a new 2-unit laboratory course on "Graphics Design in BME" in the Spring 2020 quarter for UC Davis sophomores. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the course…

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…

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…

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been effectively used within BME education, though there are several challenges in its implementation within courses with larger enrollments. Furthermore, the sudden transition to online learning from the COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional challenges in creating a similar PBL experience in an online…

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…

The COVID-19 pandemic related measures had augmented the rise of online education. While online teaching had mitigated the negative impacts from educational institutional closures, it was unable to displace hands-on biomedical laboratory practical lessons effectively. Without practical sessions, there was concern over the imparting of laboratory…

Metacognitive skills can have enormous benefits for students within engineering courses. Unfortunately, these metacognitive skills tend to fall outside the content area of most courses, and consequently, they can often be neglected in instruction. In this context, previous research on concept mapping as a teaching strategy points to meaningful…

Since spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted development of the next generation of cancer researchers and physicians, forcing pathway programs across the nation to cancel, postpone or reinvent education and training activities. Accordingly, the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center's Chicago EYES (Educators and Youth…

We will describe a one-quarter pilot algebra-based introductory physics course for pre-health and life science majors. The course features videos with biomedical experts and cogent biomedically inspired physics content. The materials were used in a flipped classroom as well as an all-online environment where students interacted with multimedia…

Many aspects of higher education must be reconceptualised for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Formative and summative assessment of qualitative work in particular requires novel approaches to cope with the numbers involved. Peer review has been proposed as one solution, and has been widely adopted by major MOOC providers, but there is…

Physiology is a core requirement in the undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum. In one or two introductory physiology courses, engineering students must learn physiology sufficiently to support learning in their subsequent engineering courses and careers. As preparation for future learning, physiology instruction centered on concepts may…

As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to experimentally study routine instructional design…