Intro

For seven years, Associate Professor Gary Velan has used Virtual Microscopy Adaptive Tutorials (VMATs) to teach histology and histopathology to medicine and science students at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. Prof. Velan creates VMATs to remediate misconceptions held by students regarding microscopy pathology—a practice that otherwise would not be possible to perform in a large virtual class.

Since first implementing VMATs have been received enthusiastically by students, who perceive that they learned more from VMATs than from exploring Virtual Slides independently. A/Prof Velan also has evidence of improved performance in practical examinations following the introduction of VMATs.

Challenge

According to A/Prof Velan, microscopy is a key component of learning in pathology and several other disciplines in medicine. However, many students find interpretation problematic, and large practical class sizes make it nearly impossible for demonstrators to assist all students having difficulties with the content. A/Prof Velan needed a tool to engage students with whole slide images, and to provide remediation on misconceptions.

Solution

A/Prof Velan creates VMATs to remediate misconceptions held by students regarding microscopy pathology—a practice that otherwise would not be possible to perform in large practical classes of more than 140 students. Through the use of VMATs, A/Prof Velan can define regions of health and disease, create questions around these topic areas, and provide dynamic, personalized feedback including, text, images, video and links to further resources.

In an extension of this work, having already played a key role in developing the Annotate tool within Smart Sparrow’s Adaptive eLearning Platform, A/Prof Velan developed a series of Virtual Microscopy Adaptive Tutorials (VMATs), using digital images, to enable online practical examinations in Histology, Embryology and Pathology. In November 2014, for the first time, online practical examinations with automated marking were employed in the UNSW Medicine program. These assessments had traditionally involved students viewing digital images and answering questions in an exam booklet.

Results

Since introducing VMATs into the UNSW Medicine program, A/Prof Velan has received enthusiastic responses from his students. In online surveys, more than 90% of students agree that they learn more from VMATs than from exploring Virtual Slides independently. A/Prof Velan also has evidence of improved performance in practical examinations following the introduction of VMATs. Overall, Virtual Microscopy Adaptive Tutorials were shown to improve student performance by 56% on standard exam scores. His medical students have scored significantly better in practical examinations on questions related to the topics of VMATs than on other questions.

Furthermore, by creating online practical examinations with automated marking, 50 hours of marking time was no longer required for each iteration of the Histology, Embryology and Pathology practical examination, which runs three times per year.

Student Feedback

“This would be a brilliant resource to refer to and use to deepen understanding. PLEASE make more of them!!!”

“This was great, more of these would make learning histopathology fun and easy!”