Transforming your classroom experience: Using Osmosis to support teaching and learning

Well, welcome everybody. My name is Caleb Ferns.

Uh I work with schools and students around the world to improve how they teach and learn using the osmosis platform and using principles from uh learning science.

Uh And I have with me uh Chantelle Chantelle. Do you just wanna do a quick intro?

Yeah. Um I'm Chantelle.

We um I am the BB Marketing Manager at Osmosis from Sevier. Very excited to have you today.

Wonderful um great guys. So I'm going to do a really brief slide just to sort of like set up the problem as I understand it based on my experiences working with students in schools.

Like what are the fundamental challenges around teaching and learning from there? We're gonna go into a couple of our videos on osmosis dot or that describe some of the approaches based on learning science that deal with the challenges that we illustrate in the slides.

Uh Finally, we're gonna start getting into some of our clinical science content and how we've employed learning science principles to help with that portion of teaching and learning.

Um So I'm, I'm hoping to sort of move slowly enough so that you guys can absorb all stuff. But I am also trying to sort of peak your interest because I think that, you know, learning science, teaching and learning is a really um you know, sort of fascinating field and there's lots of stuff to like learn and I, but at the same time, I don't wanna overwhelm you.

So what I'm hoping to do here is to give you some resources and some tips and tricks that you guys can use in your work and discuss briefly how we approach some of these challenges in our own platform.

Um I have put uh a link into the chat which goes to a Google document which has a sort of supplemental reading list that also links out to the some of the resources that we're gonna look at today.

Um And uh and I really do invite you guys to um email me or connect with me on linkedin. If you have questions about learning science, I really am passionate about this area and would really love to help in any way that I can um great.

So without further ado, let's go into um our, our slides, we're gonna sort of set the stage around some of the challenges of teaching and learning both in preclinical and in, in, in clinical.

OK. Um So again, thank you all for taking time out of your day um to come to this session.

If you guys are watching a recording of this, feel free to um play it at two X speed. This is something that I advise to uh almost everybody.

It can speed things up and can make me feel like a more fluent speaker. Uh But so um with uh that out of the way, um feel free to scan this QR code that's gonna open up a Google Doc with a lot of resources that will supplement what we're going over to today.

Um Among other things, we have a really great blog that is written by content experts from the point of view of faculty and students all about how you guys can bring uh learning science principles into your day to day experience, teaching it and, and learning.

It also links out to our content team to a couple of playlists and I'll um add to this document as I get questions both in the chat and by email.

So, um so without further ado um this webinar is about clinical science content at osmosis and our uh approach to fundamental challenges using learning science.

So what's the underlying challenge of teaching and learning? Um You know, what is the root cause?

And, and for me, it comes back to this basic problem of there being a overabundance of really complicated high stakes content that is changing all the time.

Um It's sort of uh simple to describe it in that way. And uh and obviously our experience teaching and learning in in medical school and all a health production school has a million different sort of like symptoms of this fundamental challenge.

But I think that the challenge itself can be uh summarized as that. And so as a, as a consequence, right, we have the proverbial student and even faculty member drinking from the fire hose, right.

There is just way too much content to, to absorb. Um, and, and everybody is sort of under the gun to sort of process all this content.

Um but as we sort of like dig dig deeper, we can sort of start to isolate the particular uh you know, symptoms or consequences of that underlying challenge of content overabundance.

And I'll like list some of them here. Um You know, none of these consequences are mutually exclusive and we've all had an experience with some of them, right?

So we have overwhelmed students and faculty disengagement generally, right? So you're prototypical student uh who is zoning out in a lecture that is overly dense in and not sort of hitting its mark.

Um Another consequent is, is just inefficient, studying. I mean, like a classic problem in medical schools is that people cram, cram, cram and then they subsequently almost forget all of that content.

And so they have to relearn things multiple times and that's obviously inefficient. Um you know, this all causes stress, right?

You know, students, especially people in allied health professions, the they want badly to become clinicians, they enter this profession, this profession with you know, with a real mission in mind and the stakes are high and it just causes a ton of stress.

Um, another sort of variable that doesn't get enough attention in my mind is that we are also now in this digital age, all competing with multiple streams of content all the time.

I think that most people under the age of 30 are on uh screen or device of some kind for upwards of 12 hours a day, right?

And um you know, those screens are releasing dopamine, they're engaging, they're arresting sometimes they're even educational.

But uh but, but this makes the challenge of uh of, you know, medical and allied health professions. Uh all the more sort of like challenging, right?

Because we are competing with content, we are competing for mindshare and space and cognitive load. Um Cognitive load is a term that you'll hear throughout the uh literature and in our learning science.

But if you can just think of all of these competing media streams as competing for our attention, but also literally competing for our synaptic space and our ability to sort of like process information from our short term memory to our long term memory.

Um It's really quite a challenge. Um Another thing that, you know, is true for students and faculty is that there's constant uncertainty about which content is uh verified and is worthy of studying and has been vetted by experts.

I think that, you know, along with this challenge of there being content everywhere, including medical and allied health professions content.

There is a, uh, twinned concern about, hey, is this content really valid? Has it been vetted by experts?

Um, and, uh, and so there's any number of consequences from all this stuff. Um, almost the most dire ones, right?

Are poor performance on high stakes exams, but then especially in the clinic, right? We are all drinking from a fire hose, but the stakes are very high because almost everybody who teaches and learns in an allied health profession is gonna care for somebody's loved one.

And so the consequences of of this information overabundance, right? And this cognitive load are are really high.

So, you know, some of the things that, you know, we like to do with learning science, we feel really are ultimately gonna affect the people who we care for as, as clinicians.

Um Great. So enter osmosis, we have our own approach to some of those challenges that we went through on the previous slide.

Um They include mnemonics, memory palaces test, enhanced learning, space repetition content, chunking multimedia design principles and more.

Uh I really do urge you guys to go to our blog. It's all free content.

It's really unique. The same medical illustrators that create our videos, create images to make this content as arresting as possible.

The same principles that we employ to make our educational videos as engaging and efficient as possible are the same principles that we use in our writing styles and in our visuals throughout our site and our blogger.

So it's a really great place for you guys to learn at your leisure about how to employ uh learning science. Um Great.

And then finally, um this presentation is gonna go into some specifics about how we can employ learning science, but specifically in the context of clinical education.

So, osmosis as a company initially started uh with a focus on preclinical education, like literally, how do you learn anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology from the ground up the mechanisms, et cetera.

Um But as the company has grown and as medical education has uh changed to include more clinical instruction in early early years, we are expanding our library in our approach to education to employ more sort of clinically relevant, you know, um content, but also learning strategy and, and we'll go through some of those uh in a little bit great.

So um let's look at just a classic video in our library about multimedia learning. This gets at some basic approaches to content chunking that I think are gonna be invaluable to almost anybody who is watching this lecture.

Um If you take nothing else away from this presentation, I would urge you guys all just to simplify your in there, you're sitting in a lecture with a professor who's reading power.

So I'm gonna play just a portion of this video just so you can get a sense of our uh tone and the kind of language that we use in our visual style.

And then I'll turn it on to silent with close captions. And we can all kind of collectively learn a little bit about multimedia learning.

Again, this is one approach to transforming your didactic content to make it as absorbable as possible. Point slides, densely packed with text and you're scrambling to take everything in you leave wondering if you remember anything.

Maybe you even thought about how the information could have been presented better. Well, it turns out there's a whole body of research on multimedia learning and it applies not only to slideshow presentations but to any media format, including books, audio and video present.

Great. So I am going to um mute that I'm gonna play it back at two X speed and I'm gonna um add captions to this video just so that you guys can, can follow along.

But this video is really cool because it goes through the inner workings of how the brain processes content. And literally we are just simple computers almost like uh almost like your laptop.

We only have so much ram that can move sensory and short term information to our long term and working memories. And so the way to address that and to make it as likely as possible that any given piece of information is gonna stick is to focus on chunks of content.

This is literally called content chunking. If you can make that information, audio visual and make it multimodal in the parlance of learning scientists, you're gonna improve the chances that it's gonna stick.

We're employing some of these principles here to a slide deck, but they can be applied to any dense piece of content, right?

So that, so that fun, so that foundational challenge of there being an overabundance of content, what multimedia learning and design principles and content chunking tells us is that if you can chunk that information and make it stickier by making it audio visual, you're gonna increase the chances that people can move that information from their sensory memory to their long term memory.

And now this is a really simple theory in um this is a really simple concept in theory but really hard in practice, right?

Cause it takes patience and a deliberative approach to content creation, to chunk content, to think deeply about how best to convey it and to simplify it.

It actually takes more work to do, to simplify something complex than to make something complex, more complex if that, if that makes sense.

So we're just a applying some of these principles to a powerpoint side. These are the same principles that we use when we create videos.

Um There's a link to our Learning Science Library in that um in that Google document and I hope you guys uh take a look uh another foundational part of what our platform tries to do.

And that leverages learning science is this notion of space repetition and frame the night before an exam. And after it, you probably did.

OK. So maybe you even did well mute this.

But did you remember any of what you learned after the exam? One evidence-based way to better remem.

So this is a um this is a video just about how quizzing can improve your ability to retain and recall content. Uh And it gets into some of the uh research and um and studies around, you know how we basically forget discrete content and espe and, and, and especially scientific and medical content on a logarithmic uh curve, right?

And again, this is almost intuitively obvious we've all had the experience of learning something really difficult and knowing it maybe for half an hour or longer, maybe for, for that, for that exam that that week.

But then we start forgetting it. Basically, you can use practice questions to jog your memory and it forces your brain to do more active learning and to really engage with the content in ways that you just are not forced to do when you read a textbook or you zone out in, in class, like those are good methods also and they have their place.

But fundamentally, you always want your learners, your students to be as active in their studying as as possible and quiz questions force them to be active.

And so you can use flash cards and use space repetition, which is a particular algorithm. You can also use uh vignette style questions in the osmosis platform.

We use both and tie them both to videos about discrete content so that they can improve their retention and recall. Great.

So these are two fundamental takeaways that I would love to have you guys um sort of focus in on as you think about teaching and learning in your context, make your content as chunk as possible so that people can literally absorb it.

And this can be as simple as spacing out your slide decks and keeping the information and the number of images to a minimum.

The other thing that I would really urge you guys to do is work with your students, your learners, your faculty, your colleagues on making a habit around creating and taking practice questions.

Now, uh osmosis has a question bank that's really great and can be shared with anybody. You guys can also write your own questions.

You can have your students write questions, writing questions, taking questions, thinking about questions, breaking questions down are all examples of particularly active learning strategies.

Again, we wanna get out of this default mode of being sort of passive, both as teachers and as students. We don't wanna just resort to things that are easy and that we've done a million times in the past like reading off of a lecture that's five years old or highlighting things in a textbook.

I know that when I was a student, that was what I did cause it felt comfortable, felt like I was doing something. Um But the truth of the matter is those methods while they might feel safe and comfortable, they don't actually do the work that we want them to uh do.

And in fact, learning actually at its, at its highest level, it'll always be a little bit uncomfortable. You're, you're always gonna be stretching yourself, so chunk your content, get your students to take practice quizzes in whatever sort of cadence works for them.

And that's gonna help with their, with their learning outcomes and it's gonna ultimately gonna make them into more confident clinicians.

Um Great. Um Here quickly is that blog just, you know, just Google blog.osmosis.org, I have linked to it in uh in that Google document.

All right. So let's talk just a little bit about clinical education.

So, um so one of the things that we found is that, you know, students are really good at learning about preclinical content.

And I'm going to play this cap chest pain is a common chief complaint with a broad differential diagnosis that includes some potentially life threatening causes.

So we work on these FS I'm up great. So our platform is really good at helping students learn about, you know, pathophysiology, normal physiology and um slow it down just a little bit and all the mechanisms of action, disease types and the underlying you know, molecular, you know, biology.

But one of the challenges that students have is that as they progress through, through school, they, once they've like mastered, you know, basic anatomy and physiology, um microbiology and things of that nature, how do they then synthesize all of these diseases, all of those normal, all these normal physiolog across all the possible um presentations that they're gonna see in a clinic.

And so what we have created, which is unique to osmosis are these clinical learning uh clinical decision trees that help students map out the algorithm for how they might approach any number of given uh disease presentations based on uh where it's presenting and what the best practices are.

So this is a visual tool to help students synthesize all the information they've learned in their preclinical years in a clinical setting.

Um And so just how we employed those sort of multimedia design principles. And we've kind of like made things really directed and audiovisual.

These uh clinical decision trees are helping students form like a mental map of how to think through a differential. And so we're sort of doing again, this sort of upfront work of making students really visualize all the different ways they can sort of like walk through a a particular um case.

And again, this is gonna rely upon preclinical content that they learned previously. So I paused this, this video, you can see that we're sort of like helping a learner figure out how they might assess a uh E CG.

What's great about osmosis is that we have a whole video series just on reading an EEC G. Whereas now we're asking them to employ that knowledge in a clinical setting.

Um And you'll see here too um that all of our videos are linked to related content and that we have note taking tools and we also provide a complete transcript so that anybody can, you know, at a glance, get a sense of what's being covered.

This decision tree is also provided as a uh as a stand alone uh image or a PDF. And so this is a resource that a student in their clinical years can quickly refer to, to, you know, remind themselves what the sort of progressions are and how they're gonna synthesize all this information.

Um getting back to this idea around uncertainty. Um all of our content is linked to evidence based guidelines.

So you can follow these, these links here which give the sort of underpinning rationale for how we made these decision trees.

Uh We also have learning objectives. Um These help you as a clinician and as a faculty member, think through what you want the outcome to be of any given uh video or module on osmosis.

Um So this is, you know, just a preview of all of the ways that we use learning science on our platform to help improve teaching and learning.

Um I hope that this sort of like gets your juices flowing, gives you some ideas for how you guys might use, you know, multimedia design, decision trees in your own work.

Even if um you know, even if you don't use the particular resources that uh we look at today. Um And with that, um I'll conclude our presentation.

Um I'm gonna hang around for um Q and A. If you guys have any questions do feel free to put them into the chat.

Uh Also feel free to reach out to me um at my email address. Uh It's pretty simple, it's just Caleb at osmosis dot org.

Um And if you guys have questions about learning science, uh practical things about how to employ these things with your, with your students, please let me know and I'll do my best to help you out.

Hi guys. Can you hear me?

Yes. Hi, Sherry.

Thanks for joining. Um Great.

Let, let me just introduce you quickly. So, so, uh so Sherry is one of our clinical content editors and she actually worked on these decision trees and is also uh a clinician herself.

And Sherry, I'd, I'd love to sort of get you to describe in your own words. What's some of the challenges y you had, you know, teaching and learning clinical medicine and like sort of how you think our approaches might, might deal with that.

Yeah, I mean, just thinking back to my own med school experience. Um I think when you're assigned to a team and taking care of a patient, you spend a lot of time reading up on that topic.

Um, you spend time thinking of, uh, treatments and different outcomes. Um, you wanna be prepared on rounds so you work very hard to get that all down.

Um, and then you see the other cases on your team and maybe about those. But I think for things that you don't experience firsthand, it's very hard to like enter into a topic, you don't really have a framework for entry.

Um And I think our videos and questions and the decision making trees really provide like a place to start a framework of how to start thinking about the topic, how like in your example, how to approach chest pain and then how what studies need to be done.

Um And what route do you take to narrow down the diagnosis and then in the videos for each specific topic? So for chest pain, then you'll have like an aortic dissection uh video that will lead you down of framework and decision tree and give how to think about um managing that disease and all the background you need for it.

So I think if you don't have the firsthand clinical experience on patients, sometimes everything can seem very abstract and I think this really gives a great structure uh to enter that topic and start learning about it.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks, sir.

Yeah, we were, we were talking a little bit about, you know, how this kind of plays out for students. And I liked very much this image of students when they're learning their preclinical content.

They, they inadvertently almost create little silos of that content. So they think about myocardial infarction, they think about EC GS, they think about um pharma kinetics or, or what, what have you.

But, but inadvertently, almost that content isn't sort of like widely connected and associated with all the different ways that it might be employed in a clinical setting.

And so part of what our decision trees are attempting to do is to sort of help students make those connections and to really sort of like connect the the dots and these little sort of like pieces of, of content.

Um So I think it's like a really cool and novel tool. It's also really simple and um and modular.

Um you know, it can both be like a quick reference, but it can also be something that a student looks at visualizes and internalizes as a map for how to like approach, you know, any number of like common presentations or, or, or diseases, you know, something else to share that.

Um that I've thought was really important that we discussed earlier was that, you know, one of the challenges of clinical education or like a further challenge is that, you know, any given student might not see every given presentation or every given disease based on the clinical opportunities that they have on, on hand.

So something like um so platforms like osmosis, what we provide are a way to sort of like expand your sort of uh expand the opportunities that you guys have for thinking about how these diseases can, can present.

Um And so it's a way to sort of like level the playing field and normalize and regularize the kinds of things that students are gonna be exposed to.

Um And as far as oh connecting the dots like, you know, they naturally are like I was saying before, will lead you down other videos, you're maybe gonna uh look at next, you know, in the chest pain, then you'll go to the y uh stemi for myocardial infarction and then you look at that.

So it's like the, the natural progression of your learning is connected. Exactly.

And again, this is all just a supplement or complement to what you guys as faculty are also gonna, you know, do with your students in person with real patients.

Um You know, we don't ever presume that this will replace all of that, but it's a way to get your students thinking more deeply earlier.

Um either before a session or after session, I was actually just had a really cool presentation um at a conference here in the States where um where a faculty member got a list of the actual um diseases or ailments that were coming up in clinic and then matched that to related content in osmosis and gave that to the students as review material.

So, um so again, like there's no one size fits all, but these are all great resources for you guys to supplement and complement what your students are seeing in, in clinicals and uh and sort of like how you're getting through to them to make better differentials.

Oh, great. And it looks like we have some specific questions in the uh Q and A.

Thanks um on. Um Yeah, so, so an act asks a uh good question.

Um Students ask for written resources other than the videos of the active class. Um So yeah, so we offer high yield notes which are like digital textbook chapters which summarize the most clinically relevant pieces of content for any given sort of uh category of disease types.

Um If you uh if you send me an email, I'll send you some of so some of my favorite. Um And uh and then the second question also good uh when applying active learning and student centered educational approach, students usually will be presenting in tutorial classes, what features of the platform can help them with that?

Yeah, I mean, this is a great question. I mean, I would suggest that your students could do any, any number of things they could literally um pull up one of our vignette based questions and work through that question in a small group.

E even a larger group. And really, um, and it really sort of forces students again to get more active to more actively, sort of, like, break down a test question and since they're working with their, um, with their classmates, right, they feel a real obligation to sort of, like, dig more deeply into the content in ways that they might, if they were just in a, in a lecture hall.

So those would be two things like I would um I would have your students like play a video and, or breakdown of practice questions.

We have some of our, some of our, some of our best m most you know, um most engaged students have such a flip classroom where they are actually presenting and running the classes with a, with a faculty member acting as like a mentor and tutor around the edges.

So the, so the student really owns the content and really owns the like didactic presentation. And if you can force yourself to teach somebody else, you're really gonna learn that content.

So that's the same principle there. Um Great.

Here's another question from uh uh Fara, I'm working as a clinical microbiologist and I usually use pictures from our lab during my presentation.

Is it possible to add my pictures related with bacteria content for my students to osmosis? Um So one thing that you could do would be to um create practice questions and then insert your images into the practice questions that you write and that you um present to us students that's like the best way um to sort of like make use of your own content within our platform.

Um We also do do larger collaborations with faculty and other educational groups to create custom video content and custom question content.

And so that's something else that we might pursue um do down the line. Um For if you email me, I'll, I'll send you links to our um to that division of our, of our company.

It's actually called Osmosis Diffusion Studios. And we create custom video content with, with faculty who have an interest.

Yeah. Um but these are all great questions.

Um Great. Um I think that that's all the questions, Chantelle, you'll correct me if I'm wrong.

But um and um I think uh there was one early question about are there spaces for basic sciences and EPS simulation? So, so just to be clear, we didn't even look at our preclinical content, but there's a ton of content on basic sciences, normal physiology, anatomy, um et cetera.

So definitely do check that out at osmosis dot dot org. OK.

Now, I think we got it. Um Chantelle, thank you so much for coordinating uh Sherry.

Thanks so much for joining. I know you're super busy.

Really appreciate it. You're welcome.

Thank you, Caleb. Great.

Thanks. All.

Bye. Have a great day.

Take care.