Twitter as a Tool for Teaching and Communicating Microbiology: The #microMOOCSEM Initiative.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lopez-Goni I
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5134962 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Food Microbiology is included in majors such as Food Engineering, Food Science and Technology, Nutrition, Veterinary Medicine, Gastronomy, Pharmaceutical Sciences, among others. Food safety and hygiene are usually the focus, but the technological applications of microbes through fermentations are also covered. During an education symposium at the Brazilian Congress of Microbiology in 2017, a group of professors expressed their difficulties associated with teaching to new generations, the use of technology in the classroom, and the application of new learning tools. The objective of this study was to gather information about the educational practices among Brazilian professors who teach Food Microbiology throughout the country. The results indeed confirmed the diversity of careers in which food microbiology is taught. We verified that professors mixed traditional teaching strategies with modern active learning methods, even though some difficulties associated with lack of time, pedagogical training, and low adherence of students for adopting these modern methods were commonly highlighted. The preferred teaching approaches were dialogued or discussed lectures, seminars, homework, case studies, and field visits. It is noteworthy that most professors still use traditional teaching methods. It is crucial that awareness concerning the educational needs in different careers and the challenges and dilemmas facing education for the new generations should be dealt with by using effective teaching approaches in food microbiology education. We suggest that a more permanent discussion forum among faculty members dealing with food microbiology in the country should be launched and this work is a step towards this goal.
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Project description:Service learning is defined as a strategy in which students apply what they have learned in the classroom to a community service project. Many educators would agree that students often learn best through teaching others. This premise was the motivation for a new service-learning project in which undergraduate microbiology students developed and taught hands-on microbiology lessons to local elementary school children. The lessons included teaching basic information about microbes, disease transmission, antibiotics, vaccines, and methods of disease prevention. This service-learning project benefitted the college students by enforcing their knowledge of microbiology and provided them an opportunity to reach out to children within their community. This project also benefitted the local schools by teaching the younger students about microbes, infections, and handwashing. In this paper, I discuss the development and implementation of this new microbiology service-learning project, as well as the observed impact it had on everyone involved.
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Project description:Micro-organisms play a central role in every ecosystem and in the global biomass cycle. They are strongly involved in many fields of human interest, from medicine to the food industry and waste control. Nevertheless, most micro-organisms remain almost unknown, and nearly 99% of them have not yet been successfully cultured in vitro. Therefore, new approaches and new tools must be developed in order to understand the collective behaviour of microbial communities in any natural or artificial setting. In particular, theoretical and practical methodologies to deal with such systems at a mesoscopic level of description (covering the range from 100 to 10(8) cells) are required. Individual-based modelling (IBM) has become a widely used tool for describing complex systems made up of autonomous entities, such as ecosystems and social networks. Individual-based models (IBMs) provide some advantages over the traditional whole-population models: (a) they are bottom-up approaches, so they describe the behaviour of a system as a whole by establishing procedural rules for the individuals and for their interactions, and thus allow more realistic assumptions for the model of the individuals than population models do; (b) they permit the introduction of randomness and individual variability, so they can reproduce the diversity found in real systems; and (c) they can account for individual adaptive behaviour to their environmental conditions, so the evolution of the whole system arises from the dynamics that govern individuals in their pursuit of optimal fitness. However, they also present some drawbacks: they lack the clarity of continuous models and may easily become rambling, which makes them difficult to analyse and communicate. All in all, IBMs supply a holistic description of microbial systems and their emerging properties. They are specifically appropriate to deal with microbial communities in non-steady states, and spatially explicit IBMs are particularly appropriate to study laboratory and natural microbiological systems with spatial heterogeneity. In this paper, we review IBM methodology applied to microbiology. We also present some results obtained from the application of Individual Discrete Simulations, an IBM of ours, to the study of bacterial communities, yeast cultures and Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes in vitro cultures of Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes.
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Project description:BackgroundOklahoma State University-Center for Health Sciences (OSU-CHS) has replaced its microbiology wet laboratory with a variety of tutorials including a case-based interactive session called Microbial Jeopardy!. The question remains whether the time spent by students and faculty in the interactive case-based tutorial is worthwhile? This study was designed to address this question by analyzing both student performance data and assessing students' perceptions regarding the tutorial.MethodsBoth quantitative and qualitative data were used in the current study. Part One of the study involved assessing student performance using archival records of seven case-based exam questions used in the 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 OSU-CHS Medical Microbiology course. Two sample t-tests for proportions were used to test for significant differences related to tutorial usage. Part Two used both quantitative and qualitative means to assess student's perceptions of the Microbial Jeopardy! session. First, a retrospective survey was administered to students who were enrolled in Medical Microbiology in 2006 or 2007. Second, responses to open-ended items from the 2008 course evaluations were reviewed for comments regarding the Microbial Jeopardy! session.ResultsBoth student performance and student perception data support continued use of the tutorials. Quantitative and qualitative data converge to suggest that students like and learn from the interactive, case-based session.ConclusionThe case-based tutorial appears to improve student performance on case-based exam questions. Additionally, students perceived the tutorial as helpful in preparing for exam questions and reviewing the course material. The time commitment for use of the case-based tutorial appears to be justified.
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Project description:According to a report published by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and others, global learning is considered one of the high-impact practices used to increase student engagement and motivation to learn. Engagement and motivation have also been linked to increased learning gains and improvement in the overall learning experience. Furthermore, global learning helps students explore other people's cultures and worldviews, which is an important skill for students to gain in order to compete and adapt to solve the problems of our global society. Here, I discuss two class activities that faculty can adopt to implement global learning in their courses, with the purpose of engaging and motivating students to learn microbiology while celebrating some traditions from Morocco and Perú. Students researched traditional fermented foods and drinks from Perú and Morocco. Then, they answered guided questions to help them link the food items to microbiological concepts learned in class. For example: normal flora and fermentation were learned as students researched the process of making a Peruvian drink called "chicha de jora," which is made from chewed corn that becomes fermented as it mixes with oral bacteria from saliva. While engaging in global learning, students learned some microbiology concepts; they passed the knowledge on to the campus community with poster presentations held during International Education Week. Based on students' feedback and participation, I can conclude that teaching microbiology using global learning was engaging, promoted student learning, and motivated students to learn.
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Project description:The advancing digitization of the healthcare system requires that in the future digital skills should be communicated to students much more. In addition, digital teaching and learning technologies should be used wherever they offer real benefits over other training scenarios. To meet these challenges, it needs a national initiative "Medical Education in the Digital Age", which should be led by the Society for Medical Education and the German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology.
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