I decided to take a massive risk and ask my students what they wanted.

Course Context

Students

HSCI 482 - Senior Seminar in Infectious Diseases is taken by upper division Health Sciences students in the BSc Life Sciences program and students taking the Infectious Diseases stream in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Faculty of Science. They have a strong background in immunology and molecular biology. They take this course as one of the last courses of their degree.

Course Level Learning Outcomes

• Become an “expert” in your chosen topic and become knowledgeable in key areas related to vaccine research.

• Develop strategies for selecting, reading, interpreting and presenting peer-reviewed journal articles within the context of the course content.

• Synthesize and communicate key findings from multiple research articles.

• Build independent research, critical thinking and communication skills.

Teaching Methods

I teach seminars as a facilitator. This means I expect students to generate content and discussion around specific topics. There are very few actual lectures, though I guide them through interactive skill-building classes.

I send the following message to students before they enroll in the class:

"This course is structured so that you develop independent learning skills. Most of the content knowledge that you will gain in this course will come from your own efforts. You will get out what you put in. This course is interactive, promotes discussion, and provides an opportunity for feedback from the instructor and peers. This is a seminar course and thus it will not follow a standard lecture format. Most of the presentations will be done by students. The role of the instructor in this course is to provide structure for independent learning and feedback on progress. You can expect to present regularly (a paper, a breakdown of methods). This course will be labour intensive; in a similar class, students reported working on course material 8 -10 hours per week outside of class time."

Classroom Innovation

This course design was an experiment. It has surprised and inspired me in several ways. It started because I was low on ideas. I have been trying to optimize my seminar format in the last few years. This has been challenging because I teach seminars infrequently, the number of students changes (e.g., 8 or 44), and we moved back and forth from remote to in-person instruction. I wanted to create an engaging learning experience for the students and address skill-building in reading primary literature and synthesizing information. I have also felt that my students have changed since COVID-19, and I lacked an understanding of what engagement means to them.

I walked into the course with a handful of questions, a list of potential learning outcomes and an empty canvas shell. We had a three-hour class where we met and talked about how they liked to learn, what they expected from the course, what skills were important to them and what topics they were interested in. I implemented backwards design principles (Dolan & Collins, 2015) by asking them how they would like to be assessed at the end so that it would be transparent why we were doing certain things in the course. 

The students gave me extensive feedback on what they were interested in. They wanted real-world case studies, to learn how to critique primary literature, to have creativity in their term project formats, and to have an interactive class on specific infectious diseases topics.   

I designed the rest of the course based on their feedback while maintaining my main learning objectives for seminar courses.  For the first half of the semester, I built skills with them in reading primary literature.  We focused on student-generated interactive case studies and primary research presentations for the second half. This was a risk because students had to generate the material to teach each other. 

As the course progressed, I was consistently impressed with the quality of the students' case studies. They were interactive and fun, often using pop culture to generate a theme for the case narratives. They taught each other about the week's topic and kept each other engaged with questions and worksheets they had designed. This far exceeded what I would have been able to do on my own.  I have included some sample case studies below. These were followed by presentations on primary literature where we could go into more detail on specific topics.

Throughout the course, I reinforced that they were developing real-world, transferable skills that could be used in many educational and employment contexts. Many students thanked me for teaching them these skills and said they would be used elsewhere. 

I noticed the success of the course as I graded the final projects. I was repeatedly impressed with the variety of ways students disseminated their chosen topic. There was a wide range of creative outputs, including a short story, webpages, podcasts, newspapers, an online course, a workshop and an advocacy letter. I have included some samples below. 

An unintended outcome of this course was that the students became teachers. They repeatedly told me, "Teaching is hard," after they delivered their case studies. This has inspired me to think more deeply about how teaching is a skill we should be providing students, especially since many of our students go on to jobs in healthcare where teaching others is necessary. 

"I also learned that teaching is an incredibly stressful and vulnerable experience. I learned how awkward it is when people do not participate in your interactive demos! I think that this experience really helped me come out of my shell and actively try to engage in every class." 

-HSCI 482 student

There are many improvements to be made to this format (see feedback below). However, this experiment has been a significant success for me as an instructor and my students. I am confident that my students learned transferable skills and did so in a fun and comfortable learning environment. 

"This course has been one of the best, most productive, and least stressful throughout my undergraduate studies, offering a truly productive learning experience."

-HSCI 482 student 

How I Express My Teaching Values

Mindset Transformation - I challenged students to rethink how they interacted with primary research articles and gave them tools to process information. They also learned a lot about teaching, which was an unexpected outcome of this course.

Owning Learning - This class relies on students learning a series of skills and putting them into practice. There would be no class if students didn't put in effort.

Connecting to our Shared Humanity - I asked students to create narratives to support facts. They generated creative stories for their case studies and taught each other stories that delivered content. 

Student Experience and Emotional Growth - The students felt very safe in the classroom, and I pushed them to undertake challenging assignments that they had to teach each other. They grew in their skills and generated shared experiences.

Skills Over Information: I assessed them on how they implemented a series of skills that we worked on, not on how they remembered content.

Importance of Reflection and Critical Thinking - Students had to critically think about how they were reading and had to adjust their approach.

Reference

Dolan EL, Collins JP. We must teach more effectively: here are four ways to get started. Molecular Biology of the Cell [Internet]. 2015 Jun 15;26(12):2151–5. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.e13-11-0675

FirstDay of Class Planning and Resulting Syllabus:

 Feedback and Refinements

I used student feedback at the start, middle, and end of this course. Below, I have included midterm and end-of-term student surveys. 

Things That Worked in the Course

• Discussion and interactive format

• Asking for student input in the class

• Creating a safe classroom environment where students can teach each other

Things I Need to Change

• Spread assessments more evenly throughout the course

• Refine the rubrics and deliver them to students earlier in the course

• Ask some outside experts to come in to talk to the class

• Create more structure around interaction with primary literature presentations

• Encourage more rigour in paper review and be consistent about the types of papers I want presented

• Give students more class time to work on term projects

• Shift groups around to provide more contact between students in the course

Sample Case Studies

I have included several samples of student work. In samples where I could not redact names, I have written consent from student's to share their work in this context.

Sample Term Projects

Workshop on UTIs in Older Adults

Other Course Files