But before I do that, I want to ask, have you listened to the previous episode and earned your badge for it? All you have to do is click the link in the show notes on your device or at the episode page at theAPprofessor.org/podcast, and then click the link that says claim your credential. I think if you start doing that for these podcast episodes or the books that you read from The A&P Professor Book Club, you’ll start to see things from the student perspective. And you’ll start to see that it’s not just me being silly again and proposing yet another non-traditional harebrained idea. Well, yeah, okay, it’s partly that, but also is because it works. It really is a magical ingredient, and the only way to believe in that magic is to experience it.

Kevin Patton:
One of the things I want to add to the gamification story now has to do with my example of using badges from the microcredential platform at badgr.com, that’s B-A-D-G-R.com. And I use that with the Canvas Learning Management System or LMS. I think I did mention that Badgr can be used in other LMSs too and maybe you already do that. But I also want to clarify that Badgr badges can also be used outside the LMS as I do in TAPP-ed. Now remember, TAPP-ed is my shorthand for The A&P Professor Education. That’s the program I just mentioned that allows you to earn a badge for listening to any episode of this podcast. It’s not quite as easy as having it integrated into an LMS, but it’s still pretty easy. First I set up a Badgr certificate micro-credential at Badgr.com. I have to do that step, whether I’m using an LMS or working outside an LMS, that’s where the credential lives. But I have to have a way to connect you to that badge when you earn it.

Kevin Patton:
What I do in TAPP-ed is use an online form. You can use Google Forms, but I use JotForm, which I like slightly better than Google Forms. Maybe you have a different forms platform, that really doesn’t matter, as long as you have a form. When you click on the claim your credential link in the show notes, you’ll get a form to claim the badge for this episode. Making the form is easy. Once I made the first form, I just copy that over and over, as I add each new badge, simply changing the title and the badge number. By the way, you don’t have to number badges, but I do because the episodes are already numbered and well, that’s how I keep track of them in my brain, so yeah, they have numbers. Next, I use Zapier, which is a service that connects actions in one online platform or software to another platform or software. And there are other linking services like Zapier, for example, IFTTT or well, any of several automation services. In Zapier, I set up an action or a Zap as they call it.

Kevin Patton:
Each Zap has a trigger, which is the submission of the form for a particular badge. When you submit the form, the Zap gets triggered and enters that information from the form into the Badgr database, causing the Badgr database to award the badge to you. I don’t need to do anything, it’s automatic once I’ve got it set up. And each Zap is simply a copy of the previous Zap. All I have to do for each news Zap is change which form triggers it and which badge gets awarded. It’s a really simple process. You know what? I’ll be back in a moment with even more about gamification.

Sponsored by AAA

Kevin Patton:
A searchable transcript and a captioned audiogram of this episode are funded by AAA the American association for Anatomy. You can find them at anatomy.org. As I mentioned in the previous episode, that is episode 87, AAA supports a new virtual dissection database called the VDD or Virtual Dissection Database. You can access it at www.virtualdissectiondatabase.com. Just fill out the form when you’re there, wait for approval it only takes a day or two, and then you can start exploring. Now, I recently did that and wow, it is amazing. We don’t do dissection of human body donors at our community college, so I can see this being a great resource to help our students extend their learning far beyond what we can normally provide for them. For access to the VDD and other AAA resources, remember just go to anatomy.org and click resources in the navigation ribbon.

Leaderboard Competition

Kevin Patton:
We’re revisiting that magical strategy of gamification in the A&P course that I first mentioned in the previous episode, that is episode 87. I told you in that previous episode that I was learning the Esperanto language, using an app called Duolingo, that uses gamification as one of its teaching and learning strategies. I said that one of the things that I’ve found myself watching is what level I’m moving up into next. I was hoping to get into the obsidian level when I recorded that episode, and I’m proud to say that I achieved that, and next is the diamond level. And if nobody passes me in the next four hours, I’m in. Wow, the diamond level, a dream come true. Okay. That’s not a dream of mine. Learning Esperanto, that’s a dream I’ve had since my Western Civ course, when I first learned about this constructed language, it’s built expressly to promote world peace.

Kevin Patton:
The word Esperanto means “hopeful one,” and well, it’s supposed to be 10 times easier to learn than any existing language. So yeah, of course I would be attracted to learning that language. So I don’t really care about achieving levels named for minerals in Duolingo, but you know what? Now that I’m doing it, I kind of do care a little bit enough to watch the board and see if I’m in the promotion zone that will get me into the next level when the week ends, or if I’ve dropped down into the demotion zone, which means I dropped from the obsidian back down to pearl, so I’m even further away from the diamond level. I don’t want that to happen, so yeah, I’m going to do a little bit more learning and keep myself up in that obsidian level and hopefully move further up. The reason I care is that I’m under the spell of that magical ingredient, gamification. On a day when I’d rather skip my Esperanto lesson and I don’t know, start lunch early, my inner voice tells me that it only takes five or 10 minutes, I know I’ll get out of my work thoughts and into the hope based world of Esperanto, and I’ll be more likely to move up into the diamond level finally.

Kevin Patton:
The reason I’m telling you about my Duolingo experience is that this is another aspect of gamification called leaderboards. The least leaderboard is built into the Badgr platform in my Canvas course. The Badgr leaderboard automatically populates in Canvas and shows each student and it shows the badges they’ve earned so far in the course. And as in the Duolingo leaderboard, each student’s name moves up or down the leaderboard because it’s sorted by the number of badges they’ve earned. So the leader moves to the top, and they might get knocked out by someone who earns more badges, because that new person with more badges is going to move up, and that leader’s name, that former leader’s name is going to move down.

Kevin Patton:
Whoever has the most badges is at the top and is ranked as number one. Now you might be thinking that if you’re behind your peers, that might be kind of discouraging and maybe even a little de-motivating to see your name at the bottom of the list where everyone can see it. Well, it turns out that there are two additional functions of the Badgr leaderboard that help with that. One is that Badgr uses silly, made up nicknames instead of the students real names until, and unless an individual student opts to use their own name. I, as the instructor can see their real name and they can see their own real name, but unless they have unlocked their real name, which is an option, nobody else can see their real name and well, of course, they can tell their buddies what their nickname is in case there are any inside bets going on.

Kevin Patton:
Another function of the Badgr leaderboard is that they can opt out of being on the board at all nickname or not. So they don’t have to play that part of the game if it’s something that’s not helping them. By the way, all of these functions can be toggled on or off. So you don’t have to let your students opt to use the real name. Now, my pre A&P course in which I’m using badges is self-paced, unlike most of our A&P courses. But in a self-paced course, just like in the self-paced world of Duolingo, those leaderboards can be a potent tool for keeping students moving. They kind of want to get out there ahead of the rest. One last thing about using badges and leaderboards in our course, as with nearly any non-traditional thing we do in our courses, we need to be transparent and actively forthcoming about why we’re using them. That is students need to be taught about badges and leaderboards, what they are and how they’re used, how they help in learning, and that they have the support of research in learning science.

Kevin Patton:
We want to do this at the very beginning, of course, but also our students need to be reminded about badges and the leaderboard from time to time, throughout the course, and just after the course ends, reminding students where they can access their badges and link to instructions for downloading them and posting them to their social media profiles if that’s what they want to do. Now, I do that through pre-scheduled occasional course announcements in my learning management system. Maybe you have your own way of doing that sort of thing. And by the way, I have a link to my badge page in my pre A&P course, so you can see how I do some of that work of being transparent.

Kevin Patton:
Another last thing about badges and leaderboards is that your institution may already have started an in-house scheme of badges using Badgr or some other platform. And you’re going to want to explore that before doing anything, so that you can let others guide you and you’re fitting into the plans of your school and not working at cross purposes with your peers. Or by exploring what’s already going on at your place you may find out that it’s not really going to work for you, and you may want to do badges on your own anyway. For example, if you’re part-time faculty teaching A&P at two or three different places, maybe you want to have just one badge scheme that you control. Or you may want to be able to take your badge scheme with you to a new school in a few years without having to restart in a new system. So there’s pros and cons for doing it either way. That is pros and cons for using your school’s badge system, existing badge system, or by using your own external badge system. Okay. One final last one thing I want to say about badges and leaderboards and gamification, and that is don’t forget to claim your badge for listening to this episode.

Sponsored by HAPI

Kevin Patton:
Ever thought of taking a course, or two form me, and a group of other well seasoned veteran A&P faculty, plus a few education professionals who are experts in contemporary teaching practice, including online and remote strategies? Well, if so, maybe you should look into the Master of Science in Human Anatomy and Physiology Instruction, the HAPI degree. It’s the HAPI degree that pays the distribution costs so you can listen to this podcast for free. And it’s the HAPI degree that has provided amazing professional training to hundreds of your colleagues in A&P education. Whether it’s you or someone you know who wants to up their game in A&P teaching while at the same time brushing up on content in every essential area of both anatomy and physiology, well, now’s a good time to go to nycc.edu/hapi that’s H-A-P-I or click the link in the show notes or episode page.

Pandemic Feelings of Learning

Kevin Patton:
During the pandemic this switch to remote learning has caused a lot of frustration, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other health unhappiness issues among students, their families, and among ourselves. These are serious and we need to take them seriously. And well, we ignore them at our peril. As educators, we have some responsibility to think about these things, to try to understand these things and try to be part of the solution if we can, not just we educators as a group, but we individual educators too I think. Of course, this is not a singular phenomenon, it’s a complex web of causes and effects. It’s not a thing, it’s many things together and I have all the answers and I’m going to share them with you today. No, nobody has all the answers and okay, I was not being serious about that just then, even though I just said, we should be serious about these health unhappiness issues.

Kevin Patton:
As I’ve quoted John Dewey so many times… being playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. Like getting back to the issues of frustration with pandemic teaching and learning I want to spend a brief moment laying out an idea I’ve had about that. This idea goes back to episode 83, which is a journal club episode. Our friend, Krista Rompolski brought us a journal article, examining the gap between student feelings of learning and their actual learning achievements. We learned in that episode that when students are invited to veer away from classical passive learning in a lecture only format, for example, and instead do a lot of active learning, then well, they feel like they haven’t learned as much as they do in a passive lecture, only format. But when we assess their learning in the active format, we see that they’ve actually learned more, not less than in the passive format.

Kevin Patton:
And in that episode, 83, we learned that making students aware of this natural gap and their self-awareness or metacognition from the start can help students become more aware of their actual learning. That is if we explain this phenomenon to them at the start of a course and keep reminding them, then their feelings that they’re learning less when they don’t stick with the passive format are mitigated. Now might be a good time to go back and listen to episode 83. Well, okay, not now. Wait until the end of this episode, then go back and listen to episode 83. Because in this episode I want to apply what we learned in episode 83, about student feelings of learning to pandemic teaching and learning. I’m thinking that some, not all, but some of the frustrations that both teachers and students in secondary and higher education are having right now have a lot to do with this gap in students’ self-awareness of learning when they’re asked to learn in a more student-centered, more active way.

Kevin Patton:
How many times have we heard complaints expressed in the media, or maybe even in our own courses, of students lamenting that I have to teach myself now, the teacher isn’t teaching me anymore. I’ve heard rumors at one college I teach at that our administrators have been hearing a lot of that. And I think our administrators kind of see through that, but I think many of them, and I think many of us still kind of take it to heart. I still kind of take it to heart. And I second, guess what I’m doing and worry about whether we’re doing right by our students. I mean, really isn’t that the natural state of those of us who really care about our students and their learning successes? That is, the state of always being worried, whether we’re doing all we can? But I’m thinking of that all or part of that particular complaint is based on this natural gap in the feelings of learning, when students transition from passive to active learning. At least in courses where the faculty truly are doing real work, moving students to learning activities that work well remotely.

Kevin Patton:
As we do that, we’re realizing that the mostly lecture-based teaching, mostly lengthy lecture based teaching needs to give way to more active learning, more student-centered learning during this pandemic. And as I mentioned, among my psychic predictions in episode 86, we will probably be continuing that transition even in the coming post pandemic era. Or maybe, I should say the coming inter pandemic era, if another of my psychic predictions comes to pass. In a nutshell, what I’m saying is that perhaps some of that student frustration with remote learning, isn’t about our failure to teach, as much as it’s about students coping with the change in how they learn, shifting from classical, mostly passive learning strategies to a more self-driven active form of learning.

Kevin Patton:
As we often remind our students, the teacher cannot learn the concepts for the students, handing them over in a neat little 50-minute package so that the students need not to do any work. Learning can only happen in the student and can only happen with work. The tougher the work in general, the higher, the quality of learning. That’s what active learning is all about. It’s all about that desirable difficulty that helps us grasp and fully understand concepts that I mentioned way back in episode 78. I think that students will be far less frustrated when we tell them that. When we do what that research showed works. That is, tell our students that they may start to feel like they’re learning less when we let them off the leash to learn on their own, the only way real learning can take place. And keep reminding them of that, and keep finding ways to support them and console them and guide them and coach them and love them, so that they can wake up to their own role in learning and embrace that. And they will, if we step back a tiny bit and let them.

Sponsored by HAPS

Kevin Patton:
Marketing support for this podcast is provided by HAPS the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society, which has some awesome early bird rates for our 35th annual conference coming up May 23rd to 26th of 2021. 35th annual, holy smoke, was I like 12 when I went to my first HAPS conference, maybe I was, I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like we’ve been doing this for 35 years. Anyway, it’s going to be another awesome virtual conference, and these early bird rates, which end at March 5th, they’re just one of the many awesome aspects of a HAPS conference. You want to know more? Sure you do. Just go visit HAPS at theAPprofessor.org/haps that’s H-A-P-S to check out the early bird rates and learn how to submit a poster or a workshop, but do that before March 5th. Okay?

Order of A&P Topics

Kevin Patton:
A perennial topic of conversation among A$P faculty is the proper order of topics covered in an A$P course. I’ve been talking to A&P teachers for decades and it’s always coming up. First, why do we all teach A&P topics in generally the same order? A lot of that has to do with the order in which they’re presented in A&P textbooks, which begs the question, why are they that way in A&P textbooks? And why is that order of topics nearly identical in all the A&P books? Do all the A&P authors and publishers get together in a secret meeting and fix the game? Well, as an A&P textbook author myself, and also an avid student of how textbooks are created and not being at party to any secret meetings, which I’m sure don’t happen, only non secret meetings where we mostly tell stories, and in any case, don’t do any untoward fixing of content, I think I have some authority to talk about how things got that way in textbooks.

Kevin Patton:
Evolution. That’s the answer, evolution. As the combined A&P course evolved out of separate A courses and P courses, some decisions were made. And like any of the things, any of us do in our classes, which are there because we heard about it and thought it, and thought it was a good idea, over time, we all kind of ended up telling the story of the body story and function pretty much the same way. I took A&P as a student myself, way back in the day when it was first invented. Okay, it wasn’t when it was first invented, but pretty long ago. So I kind of got that scheme burned in very early. And so for me, it just seems natural because that’s the way I first heard the story. But if you took a separate physiology course first where discussion of homeostasis starts the ball rolling, followed by membrane physiology, including membrane potentials, then the typical A&P sequence may seem kind of odd.

Kevin Patton:
It will probably seem, well, just wrong. How can a student learn about muscle contraction, and then only later learned any details about membrane potentials? That just seems backwards, doesn’t it? How can one understand the concept of the neuromuscular junction without any prior discussion of what a synapse is? That’s just wrong. If you took a separate anatomy course first before being exposed to the esoteric secrets of the A&P course, you’ll be surprised by the typical system by system approach that we use in A&P. This is especially true if it was a human dissection based course, rather than an undergrad anatomy survey course. Every fiber, every microfilament of your being will want to cover things on a region by region basis. How can it possibly make sense any other way? The systems approach is just wrong. Am I right?

Kevin Patton:
I remember a series of conversations a few years ago with a colleague who was trying to make the case that we should all start A&P with the liver. Yes. You heard me, right, the liver. That the liver and its functions connect to everything our students should know, and so it’s a logical place to start. She gave a lot of logical examples and interesting pathways to follow, to get to all the major concepts of A&P by starting at the liver. It really got me thinking differently about the liver I can tell you that. Of course, she was just being playful with us. I think, I don’t know, maybe she’s teaching her liver based A&P course as we speak, but the thing is it could work starting at the liver and maybe even work better than the traditional sequence.

Kevin Patton:
So why don’t we ever move past the casual conversation stage and start a revolution? Perhaps get someone to write an A&P textbook that upends the traditional order of topics, or go out and give workshops and seminars and try to recruit an ever larger band of disciples telling the story of human structure and function in your new and better way? Well, that could happen. It’s unlikely because massive stones like the ordered universal Canon of A&P topics are hard to budge, but still it could happen. Decades ago, a friend of mine wrote a physiology textbook. You have never heard of it, and here’s why, he told the story a different way than all other physiology textbooks. Instead of having a chapter on endocrine function, he decided to leave out that chapter and instead integrate endocrine function as appropriate into all the other chapters. So all the endocrine material was there, all those essential concepts, they were there, just not in its own discreet chapter. I liked that idea. A few people did like that idea, but most physiology instructors did not like that idea. It messed up their syllabus. It messed up their schedule of lab activities. It messed up their schedule of teaching blocks for team teaching. What is that professor who teaches endocrinology, the whole endocrinology block, what are they going to do now?

Kevin Patton:
So not very many schools adopted my friend’s textbook, and the publisher was losing money on it. And not surprisingly they stopped publishing it. So nobody got to hear that version of the story. Well, okay, a few people did, but they’re probably long gone. In case you didn’t know it, it’s incredibly expensive to produce textbooks, especially anatomy and or physiology textbooks. Really, you have no idea. So if you come up with a better story and put that into a textbook, you better have a large enough pool of adopters ready to jump on that, or your book will never see another edition, and then nobody gets to hear the story. Actually, it won’t get past the first review stage. So you can forget about that first edition anyway. And there’s the HAPS learning outcomes, and other standard guides on the order of topics. Yeah, I know, nobody is obliged or expected to follow the order of the HAPS learning outcomes, but they are there, and the topics are in the order found in all the A&P textbooks. So really, it’s kind of part of that massive body that resists chain.

Kevin Patton:
Now, part of that resistance comes in other practical matters, such as transferability of credits. Being first and foremost a community college educator, this is a big deal for me. If I teach my A&P course in an unexpected order, and then my A&P I course will be different than yours, and if my student wants to transfer my A&P I course to your institution, so they can take A&P II there, it’s not going to work. Your school, probably won’t take my course as a transfer course, but if they do, well, they do, and then that student will get some topics twice, which is not bad, but some topics will be missed entirely, which is bad. Before moving on to my main point, and yes, I do have a point I’m getting to here, let’s catch our breath for a moment.

TAPP Community

Kevin Patton:
You’re invited to join my private A&P teaching community way off the social platforms at theAPprofessor.org/community, where we’ll soon be going over the badge thing in a lot more detail within a micro course that you can earn a badge too. And if you’re hearing this before the end of February, 2021, you can go to theAPprofessor.org/insider21 for a substantial discount on your subscription to our little community.

The Proper Order?

Kevin Patton:
Okay, before moving onto my main point, I want to acknowledge two things. First, not all A&P textbooks or A&P courses or model syllabus or learning outcomes are exactly the same, only generally the same. There are topics or more often subtopics that slide around within the schemes of various A&P courses. Second, as with the evolution of organisms in nature, the evolution of the typical A&P scheme could see a rather rapid change sometime in the future. That massive resistance is not completely immovable, change is likely to be slow if it happens at all, but it could be fast.

Kevin Patton:
For example, look at some of the profound and rapid changes happening in the curriculum of medical schools and other professional healthcare programs. Such a thing could happen in the undergrad A&P course too. But my main point is that there really is no proper order of topics in the A&P course. Let me say that again for emphasis. There is no proper order of topics in the A&P course, there’s a widely used order and that widely used order seems to work pretty good, which is probably why any efforts to change it haven’t gotten very far. But remember, it’s a way of telling a story, the story of the structure and function of the human body, and like any story, literally, any story, there are many ways to tell it. As I mentioned, way, way back in episode 12, the storytelling episode, and I’ve mentioned it many times since, we are essentially storytellers in our roles as A&P instructors. And we have choices about how to tell our stories.

Kevin Patton:
Like a director handed movie rights to a novel, we can decide to start with the ending scene and use flashbacks or some other method to fill in the backstory. Or we could jump around in some other different order than what’s found in the novel and still tell a compelling story. Maybe even a more compelling story in film than there was in the written novel. It could happen, but probably the novel was successful enough to be made into a movie because the story in the novel worked, it worked in a certain order of events. Messing with that might work better, but it might be worse. It might end up being a confusing mess. I’ve seeing that happen with novels that I really liked and the movies based on them that I ended up not liking. The thing is, no matter how we tell the story of A&P there is no way to get around the fact that we will encounter topics that might benefit from having already learned a concept that comes later in the course.

Kevin Patton:
If we fix that, then that will create another place where we’re learning something before that other topic that would probably help to have covered first. That’s the thing. Structure and function in the human body is all interconnected in circular. Everything seems to come back to something else, a bunch of somethings else. So it’s a circle with no beginning and no end. And if there’s no beginning or no end, there just isn’t a best place to start, or even a best order of topics or concepts, because it’s more than a circle, it’s a web. And so what order do you move through the web? Well, lots of choices. What’s the best one. I don’t know. Maybe there is no best one, or maybe there are several best ones. It probably doesn’t disrupt the universe much to slide some subtopics around a bit within the larger scheme. I think we all do that to some extent in our role as storytellers to better fit the perspective of our particular version of the story. But for the larger scheme, it could be that it’s best to follow the crowd and relying on our predecessors in A&P teaching to have worked out a reasonable order of topic. Or I don’t know, maybe it is best to disrupt that if you think that you’ve found a better way. How willing are you today to move out of the mainstream and be on the fringe?

Staying Connected

Kevin Patton:
As always, I have links to further information. If you don’t see those links in your podcast player, go to the show notes at the episode page at theAPprofessor.org/88, where you can explore any ideas mentioned in this podcast. And if you found this episode helpful or interesting, there’s an easy way to share this podcast with a peer and also earn yourself a bit of cash. Simply go to theAPprofessor.org/refer to get a personalized share link that will not only get your friend all set up in a podcast player of their choice, it’ll also get you on your way to earning a cash reward. And you’re always encouraged to call in with your questions, comments, and ideas, including any challenges to what I’ve been talking about at the podcast hotline. That’s 1-833-LION-DEN, or +1 833-546-6336, or send a recording or a written message to podcast@theAPprofessor.org, and you know what? I’ll see you down the road.

Aileen:
The A&P Professor is hosted by Dr. Kevin, Patton, an award-winning professor and textbook author in human anatomy and physiology.

Kevin Patton:
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