COVID-19 Scramble: Adapting to Remote Learning, Suddenly

Well, friends, I'll bet most of us didn't see this pandemic coming. Not to the extent of impact it's had on the teaching and learning of anatomy and physiology. But it's here and we're going to roll with the punches and deliver a positive and productive learning experience for our students, right?

To help us all get ourselves organized and on the right track as we adapt to suddenly having to move our face-to-face course homes to a remote venue out there in the vast expanse of space, I've assembled a few "get started" resources to help you adapt.

Quickly Moving to Remote Delivery—The Musical

This is an "emergency" bonus episode of my podcast (The A&P Professor). The brief audio presentation presents nineteen tips on how to get started. And there are three A&P songs from my friend and fellow A&P teacher, Greg Crowther. For a sing-along! We could all use a light-hearted sing-along about sodium ions right now, am I right?

Go to theAPprofessor.org/64b for an audio player plus a lot of links and other resources. Or subscribe in your favorite podcast player and look for Episode 64b. If you subscribe, you can access the links and images in the shows notes of each episode right there in your podcast player. And you'll also automatically get more episodes with tips on how to cope with the current situation—and so much more

There is also an earlier episode called Mid-Winter Winterizing of Our Courses meant to help prepare us before this all flooded in upon us. Many of these prep tips are still useful, even as the metaphorical flood waters continue to rise all around us. Go to theAPprofessor.org/63b

TEACH Instructor Resources for Anatomy & Physiology

This little gem has been there all along! Really. In your Evolve (Instructor) Resources for Structure & Function of the Body 16th Edition.  TEACH has all kinds of tips and strategies that can be used to generate ideas for learning activities that can be adapted for remote teaching.

Included in TEACH are:

• Lesson Plans
• Student Handouts
• PowerPoint Slides
• Pretest Questions and Pretest Answers

If you don't have an Evolve account, then just go to evolve.elsevier.com and click on Sign In in the upper right, then click on Create Account near the bottom of the form that pops up. Make sure you apply for a faculty account. It will take a day or so to verify your faculty status.

In the search box on the home page, or when you click Catalog at the top, type in Evolve Resources for Structure & Function of the Body 16th Edition, then request access. The TEACH resources will be listed in the Instructor Resources tab.

But wait! There's more...

Besides the TEACH resources and Teaching Tips, there are all kinds of other resources in your  Evolve (Instructor) Resources for Structure & Function of the Body 16th Edition:

• Audience Response Questions—meant for "clicker" systems in a classroom, they can be easily adapted for online presentations to spark student thinking during an online "lecture" or demonstration.
• Image Collection—contains (labeled and unlabeled) jpeg and PowerPoint versions of each image from the textbook.
• Test Bank—can be a great resource for quickly constructing online quizzes and reviews. Consider using them for Testing-as-Teaching, a type of retrieval practice mentioned later in this post.

The A&P Professor

I already mentioned The A&P Professor podcast, but there is lot more there for you than those "emergency" bonus episodes. It's worth exploring the whole list for practical tips and advice as you move to remote teaching.

The great thing about podcast episodes is that you can listen to them while you are wiping down the surfaces in your home, making your family's meals, and rearranging your stacks of toilet paper.

Here are a few selected topics to start with:

• Advice for online teaching
• 50: Connecting in the Distance Course Special (general advice for staying connected to students remotely—especially important at this time)
• 52: The Case for Case Studies (case studies are a great way to teach remotely)
• 19: Caring for Students Helps Them Succeed
• Handling the chaos
• 63: Mistakes in Teaching Anatomy & Physiology (yep, if we're gonna make a lot of mistakes, this will be when—learn how to handle that)
• 51: The Case for Transparency (why being up front and honest with our students about what's happening is important)
• Testing-as-Teaching (retrieval practice)
• 01:Spaced Retrieval Practice
• 02: Testing As a Teaching Strategy

Besides the podcast, The A&P Professor website includes other resources, such as online seminars for teaching anatomy and physiology. Here are a couple that may be helpful as this time:

• Online Lecture Previews (can be adapted for any kind of online presentation)
• Testing as Teaching (randomized testing to allow multiple attempts—using retrieval practice for learning)

Free eText

VitalSource and Elsevier have partnered to provide eText access to students. To assist students at disrupted semester-calendar schools who are losing access to course materials due to COVID-19 campus closures, VitalSource has been joined by Elsevier to offer free access to etexts to students whose classes have moved online from March 16 through May 25, 2020. Students will be able to access the expansive catalog of eTexts from participating publishers through the VitalSource Bookshelf app effective immediately.

• See the announcement
• FAQs for students and educators
• List of publishers and resellers who are supporting this effort
• For students who need assistance accessing free etexts

Besides this being useful to students who are "stuck without" their textbooks, it can offer additional opportunities to connect with students in a remote environment. 

For example, something that I do in an online course I teach is let my students "subscribe" to the highlights and notes in my own copy of the eText version of the textbook. 

I can mark areas of particular importance, add commentary on what they should be looking at in a section or illustration, and clarify concepts that commonly challenge student learning. This could be particularly useful in "holding the hand" of a confused and dazed student who is trying to adapt to a new learning environment.

Coloring Book

I've been seeing a lot of advice to folks in general, telling them to sit around as a family and color in their coloring books. That makes a lot of sense in terms of diffusing stress and connecting in a positive way with those with whom we are house-bound. 

Why not suggest to students to do that, but use Mosby's Anatomy & Physiology Coloring Book as one of their coloring books? 

In a post from my blog The A&P Student, I recommend coloring as a way to study anatomy and physiology in a new and fun way—that also calms the nerves. So their nerves will become calm as they study their nerves! Check out Coloring Books Are Powerful Study Tools (And They Help Manage Stress).

Okay, whew! That's enough for now, eh? Don't hesitate to reach out if I can be of help to you. And don't forget your Elsevier Education Solutions Consultant!

What's Different in the New Edition?

When I pick up the new edition of a textbook with which I'm familiar, I usually flip through it to see how different it is from the previous edition.  And nearly always, I think "hmm...looks pretty much the same except for a new cover and a few tweaks to the page design."  And then as I delve into it, I start realizing that there are a substantial number of changes that didn't pop out at me at first glance.

When I'm teaching with that textbook, such changes are critical.  If I'm not aware of them, my students could get very confused on several points. Which begs the question, "How do you know where the changes are when your anatomy textbook is revised?"

How many times have you flipped through a chapter in a new edition and thought, "this looks pretty much the same as in the last edition"—only to have a student later point out that a term has changed, an image revised, or a section added?

Yeah, me too!

So that's why I've started keeping a log of all the changes I make globally and as I revise each chapter for a new edition.  This log—called a Changes to the 15th Edition—is available to instructors.  In the new edition of Structure & Function of the Body, teachers can log into the Instructor Resources at Evolve to access this handy guide.

When you start using the new edition of Structure & Function of the Body, you may wonder how histology content was split out (chunked) from the larger Cells and Tissues chapter in the previous edition and exactly what changes were made. That is, you want to know what specifically will impact your teaching.

With the new update guide, you'll be able to see what changes were made and you can then easily determine which, if any, have a practical impact on your course.  Perhaps you need to change a chapter number, or maybe provide an alternate term, or possibly add a new image to your PowerPoint presentation.

I always wanted to have something like this when I was teaching other courses and a new edition of the textbook came out.  Even when I found the changes on my own (or more likely, when a student pointed out a conflict between what I told them was in the book and what was actually in the book), I didn't always understand why those changes were made.

So I created the update guide so you can not only see what revisions were made, but also a brief note about the rationale for the changes.

My plan is to also share some additional background and rationales for specific updates and textbook features here in this blog, where I have a bit more space to fully explain them.

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Cartoon:adapted from Raúl Ruano Ruiz

Photo: K Patton

New Edition of Structure & Function of the Body Coming in November!

It's at the printer!

The new 15th edition of Structure & Function of the Body is out of my hands, and the hands of my editorial team, and has landed safely at the facilities that print, gather, stitch, bind, shrink-wrap, box up, and put the bows on the published book.

By the end of November, you can hold one in your hands—or view it on your iPad or Kindle—and see for yourself what I'm so excited about.

It's an edition full of "firsts" for Structure & Function of the Body, all of which I'll be revealing in future posts at this blog. I'll also be explaining the rationale for each of these innovations from a teaching and learning perspective.

Want to make sure you are kept in the loop? Then why not subscribe to receive an email (or tweet or whatever) as soon as I post each new article here?

Stay Up to Date with Structure & Function of the Body

For more than two decades of revising Structure & Function of the Body, I've wanted to share my thoughts about the choices I make as I update content, integrate new study tools, and reorganize chapters.

Gratified by the success of my previous blogs that reach out to A&P teachers and students in a more general way, I realized that a textbook-specific blog is a great medium in which to dialog specifically about a particular A&P textbook. So almost a year ago, I launched book-specific blog for my two-semester textbook, Anatomy & Physiology. That blog has revolutionized the author-user dialog in unexpectedly productive ways. And today I'm launching a similar blog that discusses, dissects, and describes my one-semester textbook, Structure & Function of the Body.

Leading up to the publication of the new 15th edition of Structure & Function of the Body, I'll be describing some of the exciting changes and new features of this popular textbook. Going forward, I plan to share the story behind the choices our team makes in revising and supporting Structure & Function of the Body. I also intend to offer some tips, shortcuts, and advice in using the book and related resources to teach in the classroom  and online.  And I'll be sharing a few anecdotes from the history of this book, my partnership with coauthor Gary Thibodeau and other collaborators over the years, and some behind-the-scenes adventures.

I'll even reveal some "easter eggs" in the book such as photos of friends, family, and colleagues that appear in some of the illustrations.

I also hope that you'll use the comment feature of this blog and also reach out to me personally to ask questions and offer feedback.  We can thus form a community of professionals interested in helping each other help the A&P students of our generation become successful.

Off we go!