Carlo Siracusa

Just a few years ago, I was skeptical about online teaching. I was not convinced that students could learn effectively online. In particular, I thought that they could not learn how to effectively diagnose and communicate with clients (pets’ owners), and practice the critical thinking skills that are essential for clinical work. I also feared that I would lose the pleasure of working with students. However, both by developing courses that are purposely online and by leading courses that had to go online because of the pandemic, I’ve found that using online discussion boards prepares students effectively for the type of critical thinking they need and allows me to know them as well as or better than in in-person classes.

My attitude toward teaching online changed when, defeating my initial skepticism, I developed an online certificate program with a group of inspired colleagues. Within this program, I teach the online course Fundamentals of Animal Behavior (FoAB) that reviews principles of animal behavior and their application to animal welfare in a non-clinical setting. In this course, I first got the chance to experiment the use of online discussion boards to talk about controversial topics with the students. 

The FoAB course is published in the learning management system Canvas, and is composed of weekly modules populated with videos on core theoretical concepts and recommended literature to review. Among the assignments, the students have to attend a synchronous review session via Zoom and participate in a weekly asynchronous discussion board on a controversial topic (e.g. the validity of behavioral testing in laboratory animals). The students have to follow the discussion throughout the week, post an original contribution using a maximum of 250 words, and comment at least once on the post of a classmate. The students’ statements must be meaningful, critical, and supported with references to published literature. The main teaching goal for the discussion boards of the FoAB course is practicing critical thinking and teamwork. 

It is interesting to note that the students of the FoAB course complete all the activities remotely and never meet in person with each other or with the instructors. Therefore, I was surprised at first to see how much the students and the instructor behaved as a bonded community during both the synchronous sessions and the asynchronous discussions. The asynchronous discussion boards specifically are developed during the entire weekly module and do not suffer from the time constraints of an hourly synchronous session. They permit all members of the group to observe and review multiple exchanges and intervene when desired. At the end of the 7th week of my first online course, I knew the skills of the FoAB students better than those of my pre-clinical students in the “traditional” Veterinary Medicine doctoral degree, to whom I teach clinical animal behavior in person for a longer time. 

Even after having accumulated this anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of online learning, I did not want to give up the pleasure of interacting in-person with my pre-clinical veterinary students. However, the pleasure of in-person teaching did not last long because the coronavirus pandemic made its appearance. My experience with online learning could have come in handy at that point, but I still saw some obstacles in adapting what I had learned working online with a class of 20 FoAB students to a large class of 130 veterinary students. First, I needed to adapt the content of a live lecture of 50 minutes into video lectures of 10-15 minutes and readings for self-study. Second, I needed to determine if synchronous and asynchronous interactions were suitable for and beneficial to the large class. Third, I needed to decide how to assess the students’ learning and skills. For this purpose, I had traditionally used a final examination with multiple-choice questions on real-life clinical cases presented to the students via text and videos.

After a thorough analysis, I decided to apply what I learned teaching the online FoAB course to my nine-hour Clinical Animal Behavior course. I rearranged the content of the lectures and the examination across seven weekly modules. To replace the original lectures, I created two to three weekly short video lectures and selected reading materials. I replaced the final examination with seven asynchronous discussion boards of clinical cases, one for each module. Based on my previous favorable experience with the discussion boards and considering the large size of the class, I decided to not include synchronous sessions in this course. 

The discussion boards were built to be the main learning tool in the course and to test knowledge, critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and teamwork. Clinical reasoning is the ability of the students to extrapolate and organize relevant information from the patient’s history and examination, and then use it to reach a diagnosis and to create a treatment plan. With these goals in mind, I presented the students with a clinical case for which I provided the history and a description of the clinical examination. I divided the class into four groups and asked all the students to contribute to the discussion of the case. Within their group, each student needed to write a post of up to 250 words and could add a second post on a voluntary basis, after all of their colleagues had posted at least once. Each participant had to follow up on the comments of the other students to build communally the analysis and treatment of the assigned case. 

I have now used this format for two consecutive years of teaching the Clinical Animal Behavior course online. Hearing the students’ comments from the first year, I divided the class into smaller discussion groups of 10 students in the second year. Moreover, I had the chance to observe the students from the first year transitioning to clinical rotations with patient-side activities, during which they have to apply the skills learned in the behavior course. Based on preliminary observations, I saw that the students who participated in the clinical discussion boards performed better in their patient-side activities than students taught in a traditional way. This experience further grew my belief that online discussion boards are effective for refining critical thinking and teamwork skills. I also witnessed how the discussion of clinical cases through structured online discussion boards is ideal to practice clinical reasoning and prepare the students for patient-side clinical activities. 

I believe that the same structured discussion boards could be implemented outside of an online environment with comparable benefits. For this reason, I plan to use structured discussion boards from now on, in whatever mode I teach. Online learning comes, in fact, with its own challenges. The main challenge that I experienced is the amount of time needed to develop and teach an online course. Among the most time-consuming activities are recording the video lectures, moderating the discussion boards, and reviewing all the assignments. All this may be particularly difficult for faculty members who, like me, have clinical duties assigned. Nevertheless, my skepticism about online learning has dissipated and I have become an advocate of structured discussion boards when teaching my students!

Carlo Siracusa is an associate professor of clinical behavior medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. 

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This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. 

See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.