gms | German Medical Science

The course presented here represents a compulsory elective course of the 10^th semester (seminar/practical course 809.086, Fluorescence-based methods in cell biological research) of 15 academic hours, which was held for 3 groups of 5 participants each within different weeks.

The learning objective was to promote scientific thinking. For this purpose, different biochemical methods were presented to the students. Based on selected problems, students had to discuss which scientific questions can (not) be answered by means of the respective methodology. In the practical part of the face-to-face course, students were instructed in the use of a flow cytometer (antibody staining of their own blood samples) followed by basal analysis and interpretation of the obtained results.

Due to the COVID-19 prohibition of classroom teaching, this course had to be adapted to remote teaching.

This was realized by assigning an individual topic to each of the five students of each group (see legend in figure 1 [Fig. 1]). While preparing these individual topics, students received feedback and advice regarding structure and intended level of detail of the presentation they had to prepare (maximum of 4 slides). In addition to a concise summary of the given topics, scientific thinking was promoted by the requirement to consider the applicability of the respective methodology to specific scientific questions (“Formulate different scientific questions which could be investigated with ...”).

For a subsequent virtual presence phase, a group jigsaw puzzle was used and the prepared topics were taught to the whole group in a (supervised) peer-teaching session. This was followed by a discussion on content, applicability of the methodology and the scientific questions proposed for the topics.

Since the main focus of the course was on applied flow cytometry, great efforts were made to compensate for the loss of face-to-face teaching – and the resulting inability to operate the cytometer by hand – as effective as possible.

Concrete goal was to make virtual sample acquisition appear as realistic as possible and to illustrate the influence of different experimental conditions on the results obtained.

The theoretical basics of flow cytometry were specifically taught in an independent virtual presence phase. A presentation created in Adobe Captivate^® was used for the subsequent cytometry-specific teaching content.

Video sequences of authentic sample acquisitions were integrated into Adobe Captivate^®. After documentation and verbal explanations of the respective experimental conditions, this “virtual acquisition” could be started by pressing a button – the visual presentation of sample acquisition was not distinguishable from the original process. In addition, interactions were inserted for the interpretation of the (virtually) obtained scatter plots, which allowed to directly compare the plots obtained during sample acquisition (basal demonstration available on http://educativo.at/DemoFACS/)

This presentation was shared via WebEx from the screen of the lecturer with the students of the respective group; for the individual examination of the interactive elements as well as for post-processing of learning contents, the presentation was available to the students for self-paced learning and full (interactive) functionality on the internet.

A presentation with interactive elements and video sequences was created in Adobe Captivate^®. This presentation was published on a web server in HTML 5 format and therefore was accessible from any web browser independent of the operating system (i.e., also on tablets).

For a user experience as close as possible to the original sample acquisition, video sequences of authentic sample acquisitions were recorded at a frame rate of 30 frames per second on the control computer of the flow cytometer. The software used was easyscreencastrecorder (freeware, [https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2840]), which allows the recording of videos also in defined subareas of the screen. The resulting mpeg (Audio Codec Engine PCM) was converted with OpenShot (freeware, [https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2840]) to mp4 (h.264) with video profile HDV 720 24p (1280x720) in high quality and integrated into Captivate in this format.

Adobe Captivate^® was used to create an interactive presentation that was also made available to students via the internet. Due to the short time available for the required implementation, no systematic evaluation could be conducted, which is a clear limitation of this work. Narrative feedback from students was consistently positive; contributions elaborated by the students during the course demonstrate a learning outcome comparable to that archieved in the last years in presence mode.

Implementation of this solution represented a highly time-consuming process of about 35 hours for a resulting teaching time of 4 hours. The interactive course described here will also be implemented when returning to classroom teaching.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.