Using Osmosis to support distance learning

Definitions & Key takeaways

Osmosis offers a range of tools that can be helpful to students, educators, and healthcare professionals. Some of these tools include: Video lectures and quizzes: Osmosis offers a variety of video lectures and quizzes on various healthcare topics, which can be accessed by students and healthcare professionals from anywhere with an internet connection. The videos are designed to be engaging and easy to understand, and the quizzes can help students test their knowledge and track their progress. Flashcards and notes: Osmosis also offers flashcards and notes that can be used to review key concepts and terminology. These resources can be especially helpful for students who are learning remotely and may not have access to traditional classroom materials. Study schedule: Osmosis offers a personalized study schedule for students who want to stay organized and on track with their studies. The study schedule is designed to help students prepare for exams and retain the information they have learned.

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My name is Catherine Johnson and I'm Senior Director of Institutional Engagement at osmosis as an instructional designer and education specialist with more than 25 years of experience in health professions, education and Ed Tech.
I've seen firsthand the challenges and rewards of e-learning for both students and faculty. If you're looking for ways to utilize osmosis and teaching and learning in your class, then you're in the right place.
Most us med schools have long been recording lectures for students to view from home and only about 20% of students regularly attend lectures.
So the practice of distance learning isn't new to med Ed. The question then becomes how to optimize online learning with tools like osmosis, especially in situations when physically gathering students together isn't feasible given emergencies or geography, osmosis was designed from the ground up as a curricular support tool and it's built on established learning science and multimedia design principles.
As such, it includes videos, flash cards, multiple choice questions, a study schedule tool and it encourages note taking and collaboration through osmosis workspaces.
If you want to learn more about the learning science behind osmosis, check us out at www.osmosis.org/learning dash science the core of osmosis is our library of more than 1200 high quality illustrated videos broken into three learning levels to meet learners where they are at.
The simplest level are 100s of basic science and disease videos designed for learners who either haven't been exposed to a topic before or who want clarification on the topic.
The next level up are high yield pathology videos. These videos which cover the highest yield topics on the USM le step one complex level one and pants really synthesize clinical topics and begin and end with contrasting patient cases to bring the subject to life and make it memorable.
Our 185 clinical reasoning videos are designed for learners who have some command of the subject, usually clinical students and summarize foundational science underpinnings before moving into disease manifestations, differential diagnosis and management.
They're largely organized by organ system or by specialty with options to sort our basic science videos by farm path or physiology.
OK. Now that you're hopefully more familiar with the osmosis video library, here are some best practices for using osmosis in teaching and learning.
Let's start with the asynchronous part of distance learning coursework. We recommend providing your students with curated lists of osmosis videos aligned with your class learning objectives.
These videos can be used as supplements to your own lectures or if you're strapped for time or covering for a colleague, they could be used in place of a lecture.
If you wanna flip the classroom, you can assign osmosis videos as prework to prime students learning before your active learning sessions.
There are a few ways to get videos to students. One strategy is to share links to individual videos using your L MS, simply copy the videos URL post it into your L MS and Voila want to assign or recommend a collection of videos for a class.
Osmosis includes an easy way to use a playlist feature. Simply select the videos you want add them to a new or existing playlist, which you can name and drop the playlist URL into your L MS.
You can also share a playlist via email. If you're familiar with osmosis, you know that our videos are accompanied by assessment items, both flashcards and multiple choice questions.
These are a great way for your students to check their comprehension and for you to see whether students understand what they learned by using the osmosis dashboard.
We'll talk more about the dashboard in a moment, but you should know that when you create and share a playlist, it automatically gathers all the related assessment items in one place.
Students can then practice with the same items using a link at the top of the playlist. Easy peasy.
As an added bonus, students can practice good learning habits like spaced repetition and retrieval practice by regularly answering osmosis flashcards.
They can improve their exam day performance through continuous practice with osmosis MC Qs and they can engage in active self directed learning with osmosis videos and assessments.
Now, back to that analytics dashboard. If you're an osmosis institutional subscriber, you've got a window into how all the students in your cohort are performing.
You can see overall views of videos, flash cards and multiple choice questions. And you can drill down to look at individual student performance when we're working with students remotely having this window into areas of strength and difficulty can make one on one conferences and small group sessions more productive.
You and your students can spot these weaker areas and focus on clarifying difficult concepts before moving ahead to the next lesson.
Let's imagine that your distance learning course also includes some live or synchronous learning time too. That could be in a lecture hall, a small group learning space or in a virtual meeting room like Zoom or Webex.
How could you use osmosis content? There, here are a few ideas.
If you assigned osmosis videos as prework, consider starting your session with some audience participation, utilize flash cards or MC QS connected to the osmosis videos.
Students can answer with eye clickers or audience polling tools and then you can spend a few minutes clarifying ideas and areas of confusion or talking about clinical application of the topic.
For example, course exams coming up, many students have difficulty transitioning from fact recall to application and many students need help learning how to reason through board style questions.
You might bring up an osmosis multiple choice question and model clinical reasoning while ruling in or out certain answer options to recap.
First, don't reinvent the wheel, use osmosis videos to supplement or replace lectures use as Musa's playlist to easily share collections of videos and associated assessment items.
Clarify understanding by using osmosis Q and A at the start of live learning sessions. Encourage good learning habits among your students.
Retrieval practice reduces the forgetting curve and practicing with multiple choice questions, enhances test a performance monitor, student performance using the osmosis analytics dashboard.
Thanks for joining me to learn about using osmosis to support distance learning. If you have questions about this or if you don't have the resources you need at your school, please reach out to us at partnerships at osmosis.org.
We're here to help.