Protocol: the effects of flipped classrooms to improve learning outcomes in undergraduate health professional education: a systematic review

[Extract] The teaching and learning activities of any undergraduate curriculum will have a specific set of learning outcomes that should be successfully achieved by the students. The balance between the workload of a student and the available time to achieve the learning outcomes plays a major role in achieving these learning outcomes, as well as a good student satisfaction score and excellent final grades for that particular module (Whillier & Lystad, 2013). In a traditional educational experience, a teacher stands in front of the classroom, delivers a lecture to a group of students, who sit in rows, quietly listening to the lecture and taking notes. At the end of the lecture, students are given homework or an assignment to be completed outside of the classroom environment. This characterises the principle of “sage‐on‐the stage”, and is synonymous with the present day term of teacher‐centered learning. This is also referred to as the transmittal model (King, 1993), which assumes that the students are passive note‐takers, receivers of the content or accumulators of factoids (Morrison, 2014). Usually, the teacher does not have time to interact with the students individually during the class (Hamdan, McKnight, McKnight & Arfstorm, 2013), thus neglecting those students who do not understand the lecture. The traditional didactic way of teaching is primarily unidirectional and consists of limited interactions between the source of knowledge (teacher) and the passive recipients (students)

Designing citizen science tools for learning: lessons learnt from the iterative development of nQuire

This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed ‘citizen inquiry’, which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, ‘citizen inquiry’, by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time

Communally breeding bats use physiological and behavioural adjustments to optimise daily energy expenditure

Small endotherms must change roosting and thermoregulatory behaviour in response to changes in ambient conditions if they are to achieve positive energy balance. In social species, for example many bats, energy expenditure is influenced by environmental conditions, such as ambient temperature, and also by social thermoregulation. Direct measurements of daily fluctuations in metabolic rates in response to ambient and behavioural variables in the field have not been technologically feasible until recently. During different reproductive periods, we investigated the relationships between ambient temperature, group size and energy expenditure in wild maternity colonies of Bechstein’s bats (Myotis bechsteinii). Bats used behavioural and physiological adjustments to regulate energy expenditure. Whether bats maintained normothermia or used torpor, the number of bats in the roosts as well changed with reproductive status and ambient temperature. During pregnancy and lactation, bats remained mostly normothermic and daily group sizes were relatively large, presumably to participate in the energetic benefits of social thermoregulation. In contrast, smaller groups were formed on days when bats used torpor, which occurred mostly during the post-lactation period. Thus, we were able to demonstrate on wild animals under natural conditions the significance of behavioural and physiological flexibility for optimal thermoregulatory behaviour in small endotherms