The lecture Imaging and Computing in Medicine (ICM) is an interdisciplinary class offered to bachelor students from D-HEST, D-MAVT and D-ITET. Experience has shown that there are major differences in the fields of interest and the programming levels of students, setting a challenge to ensure optimal learning outcomes. The aim of this project is to facilitate onboarding of students who lack computational competence, providing students with interactive programming experience and improving student skills in the field of simulation and visualization. The format is a flipped-classroom mini-course which is offered next to the ICM lecture. The course integrates Jupyter notebooks into active learning sequences and includes an individual assessment tool on Moodle.
The mini-course consists of seven modules that include basic programming, finite-element simulations, visualization and machine learning principles. It uses an interactive programming environment with simple visualizations of the logic of programming and a focus on applying data analysis, visualization, and simulation.
We use the principle of flipped-classrooms to encourage student engagement by providing the interactive minicourse with tailored programming tasks that follow the lecture’s schedule. We involve students in further course development, collecting their ideas, needs and feedback on the clarity and visual appeal of the Jupyter notebook activities. Students’ feedback is also used to iteratively improve the Jupyter notebook experience. We ask students what they understand the least to identify the areas to focus on in subsequent activities. Course-related self-confidence surveys at the start, midpoint and end of the course are used to track students’ satisfaction quantitatively. In addition, tutors are hired from the student body who had previously taken the class. These tutors are encouraged to provide feedback from their exercise sessions every week to help with improving the existing Jupyter notebook activity and draw from their experience as students to do so.
We empower students to learn state-of-the-art computing techniques while proceeding at their own speed. The practical learning elements are tailored to the lecture for which the students need the visualization, data analysis, and simulation knowledge. We have developed a simplified finite-element-solver (pixFE 2D FE solver) that can easily be understood by the students. These elements are designed to help computationally not yet settled students to build a solid foundation in much needed areas of computing.
- Question:
- What effect did the innovative elements have on student learning?
- Answer:
- The minicourse employs classroom assessment techniques to test students’ understanding and learning. The minicourse empowers students to close individual learning gaps during the actual course of the lecture. Students reported back that they enjoyed the possibility to go in depth regarding their programming skills. Furthermore, providing such interactive mini-course frees up time for teaching assistants and faculty, allowing them to channel more of their effort towards teaching.
- Question:
- How did you ensure (continues) feedback on student learning progress?
- Answer:
- The mini-course assessment methods allow individual progress tracking of the student learning progress on the course platform. Additionally, we encourage students to provide feedback on the course structure, content, and teaching methods and we use this feedback to make iterative improvements to the course content and structure.
- Question:
- Which elements of your project would you recommend to others?
- Question:
- The experience and feedback gathered from our implementations of Jupyter notebooks in the ICM class have helped us develop material and tools to enable students to maximize their learning outcomes. So far, we have learned that students work best when surrounded by students at their own level of programming and when they are able to gauge their performance interactively. Using the didactic principles of interactive learning and productive failure we have developed such tools to provide students with immediate feedback on their code.
