BIPN 100 SP25: Course Retrospective

This quarter was my second offering of BIPN 100 (Human Physiology I), and overall I’m very pleased with how things went! I knew that this quarter I would be investing most of my energy towards developing materials for BILD 5, a course with significantly more moving parts to organize. Therefore, my goal was to run BIPN 100 on ‘autopilot’ as much as possible – I tried to resist implementing any sweeping structural changes, and instead focused on making small incremental edits. This process of progressively refining my classes is actually something I really enjoy about teaching; I think of each course as a creative product—each time I teach a class, I get to chisel away at its design, slowly converging upon the best possible product. Right now, it looks like BIPN 100 will become my flagship course for the near-term future, since I’m assigned to teach it four more times in the next year: summer 2025, fall 2025, winter 2026, and spring 2026. My personal goal is to keep finding ways to keep the course feeling fresh, so that my students who take v5 or even v20 experience the same excitement as my students who took v1. That said, I do think that teaching the same course four times a year is a bit much... hopefully I’ll settle into a rhythm where I’m teaching the courses in my rotation (currently BILD 5, BIPN 100, and BIPN 103) no more than twice a year, to give me a mental reset between offerings.

I was really happy with how I structured BIPN 100 in the winter, so I kept the basic ingredients the same. Each week, we met for three 50-minute lectures on M/W/F. Before every lecture, students completed a Pre-Class Assignment (PCA), which consisted of watching 1-2 short videos (example) that previewed the lecture material, then answering 3-4 quiz questions about those videos. At the end of each week, students completed a Concept Check assessing all the content covered that week. When I first decided to adopt this course structure (inspired by a wide body of educational research, e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4), I was apprehensive that the workload would be overwhelming for students. Therefore, I tried to mitigate this in two ways:

1. Make the PCAs as pithy as possible by keeping each video under 10 minutes (most were significantly shorter). I have no interest in busywork – any time my students spend on my class should be time well spent. Indeed, the goal of the PCAs was to prime my students’ thinking and build the conceptual groundwork ahead of class time. That way, when we tackled more challenging material during class, the PCAs could serve as a foundation or anchor point—something students could return to if they began to feel lost.

   
   

2. Make the deadlines simple to remember – assignments were always due M/W/F right before class. My goal was to help students settle into a steady rhythm: they knew something was due each class session (PCAs on M/W/F, plus the weekly Concept Check on Monday). No shifting deadlines—just M/W/F, right before class.

Although creating the PCAs last quarter involved significant upfront effort (I made 36 videos!), it really paid off this quarter. I essentially reused all the same PCAs from the winter (in addition to a few new videos I created to offload some content from the densest lectures). Furthermore, my students really appreciated them – in my course evaluations this quarter, half the respondents singled out PCAs as the most helpful resource for their learning (including two comments that begrudgingly admitted that the work was in fact worth it). I’m really glad that I took the leap to make these PCAs, and I definitely plan to continue incorporating them into any future classes I might teach.  

In addition to creating a few new PCAs, most of my time was spent making little edits to tighten up the lectures. Last quarter, after each BIPN 100 lecture I would sit down and make a note of what didn’t go to plan, which quickly turned into a long list of things to improve for next time. More than once, an explanation or activity that sounded great in my head would fall flat when delivered live; I’d often catch myself mid-sentence thinking “Huh, now that I’ve said it out loud, it really hasn’t landed the way I thought it would”.  I’ll admit that making this list wasn’t exactly the most pleasant experience in the moment, but I’m SO glad that past Ming decided to stick it out. Some of the improvements included:

1. Adding new lecture slides to strengthen the logical flow of the narrative, by filling in key steps that I realized were missing. For example, last quarter my Action Potentials lecture caused significant confusion because I neglected to clarify several key explanatory steps—such as explicitly reminding students where voltage-gated channels are located in a neuron. Although I had briefly mentioned this point in the PCA, the lack of an explicit reminder during lecture led to considerable confusion later on when we discussed action potential propagation. I also wrote several iClicker (in-class discussion) questions to specifically target these topics that last quarter's students found confusing. This was just one of several instances where student questions revealed gaps in my explanations—places where I had unintentionally skipped over key steps in the reasoning.

   
   

2. Creating graphic organizers that I’d fill in with the students during class. For example, I made a graphic organizer to compare the properties of different muscle types, and another to compare the structure and function of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Like most of physiology, these topics are challenging since they require students to reason across multiple length scales (from the chemical level to the macroscopic/systems level). I often found that my students were getting bogged down in the details and lost sense of the bigger picture, I wanted the students to better appreciate how everything fit together.

   
   

3. Refreshing many of the diagrams on my slides. For many topics, I like to create my own illustrations on PowerPoint that I can easily edit, animate, and annotate over. Last quarter, I realized that there were several diagrams that required additional clarification. For example, my use of arrows was often quite haphazard – in some lectures, → meant ‘activate’, in others it meant ‘lead to’ (potentially an inhibitory downstream component), and elsewhere it meant ‘increase the concentration of’. Indeed, the confusing nature of arrows in biology is already well-documented by my collaborators Dina Newman and Kate Wright. Since physiology is very diagram-rich, I incorporated additional scaffolding and problem solving about figure interpretation, clarifying what different visual elements meant in context.

   
   

While I'm very proud of the progress I've made in teaching BIPN 100, there are still many areas I'm excited to refine. I want to incorporate more active drawing (and critiquing) of diagrams during lecture so that my students can develop their visual literacy skills. I want to anchor more of my teaching in physiology core concepts so that the course feels less like a random grab-bag of facts, but rather a cohesive reflection of core principles. And there are several topics that I

want to explain better – my lecture on renal clearance still feels quite messy and unnecessarily math-heavy, and I'm still dissatisfied with how I explain several topics in cardiovascular physiology (the effects of venoconstriction vs. vasodilation, and the relationship between end-diastolic pressure and afterload).

Once again, I had an amazing group of students this quarter – I feel like I really got to connect with a good chunk of the class, and I was sad for the course to end. Onwards to summer session II, where I'll be teaching BIPN 100 at double-speed as a 5-week course!

Syllabus: Link