BIPN 100 SU25: Course Retrospective

Round 3 of teaching BIPN 100 is under my belt! It’s really quite surreal how quickly the quarter system goes by – even though I still feel brand new in this role, I’ve somehow already taught physiology from beginning to end three times over. I certainly felt that pace this summer, where I had to truncate my 10-week physiology course into five weeks.

To be honest, I don’t think I did a great job of restructuring the class for this double-speed version. I made several decisions that I thought would help the students learn better, but there were unanticipated ripple effects that inadvertently gave the students a lot of stress.

The core structure was as follows: since I had already organized the course material into 50-minute lectures, I opted for my summer class to meet twice a week, for three hours each time. During each class meeting, I basically taught three 50-minute lectures back-to-back, with 10-minute breaks between each one. That amounted to teaching a week’s worth of material in a single class session. I also took the Pre-Class videos, which students would normally watch before each 50-minute lecture, and I compiled them into a longer playlist for each three-hour meeting (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Structure of my summer BIPN 100 course

I chose this course structure for a number of reasons. Firstly, it meant I wouldn’t have to reorganize the existing narrative flow of my lectures (the other option would’ve been to meet four times a week for 80 minutes each time, which would’ve required me to chop most my lectures in half – but I’d already invested significant time into making each 50-minute lecture a complete, self-contained narrative). Second, I figured that as long as I provided ample breaks, it probably wouldn’t be that different from what students were used to during a normal quarter. When I was a student, I intentionally tried to schedule multiple classes back-to-back, and three consecutive lectures was a normal (and desirable) arrangement. So in a sense, I hoped that students would just feel like they had three separate classes back-to-back — except that this time, all three were taught by me.

Although this led to extremely information-dense lectures, there were some unexpected benefits of stacking together the topics in this way. Firstly, it really allowed the cumulative nature of the material to shine, and I was able to highlight how the topics built on top of each other. Indeed, I find the cumulative nature of physiology to be one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching this material — if the story is designed well, I think there’s a real possibility for the students to recognize a coherent narrative developing across the quarter. Emphasizing these connections was often challenging during the regular 10-week course — for example, during my lecture about pressure-volume (PV) loops, several students had already forgotten what preload, afterload, and contractility meant, which would just totally obfuscate any attempt of understanding PV loops. This time, the previous lecture happened mere minutes (and not days) earlier, so the prerequisite knowledge was fresher in my students’ minds. Furthermore, I think that having three-hour classes better emulates the experience students will eventually have in medical school, where many of them will experience multi-hour blocks of lecture about the same organ system.

This lecture stacking also helped me realize where the transitions between lectures weren’t as smooth. During a regular quarter, the 2-day gap between lectures naturally paved over abrupt transitions between topics. This summer, I would occasionally find myself going “Whoa, we just talked about feedback loops, and suddenly we’re talking about membrane potentials – how do I create a more coherent throughline between these topics now that we are having them one after the other?”

So far, so good — even though three-hour classes aren’t optimal for learning, I think I made it work. The bigger problem was how I scheduled the assessments. As I type this, I can picture future Ming reading this, thinking “How were you so naïve to think this could possibly be a good idea?”. Shrug. To distribute my 26 lecture topics across three exams, I had Midterm 1 cover topics 1-9, Midterm 2 cover topics 10-18, and a cumulative Final. Because I was teaching T/Th, one option I considered was to have the Midterms on the Thursdays of Weeks 2 and 4 (Fig. 2, Option 1). This seemed like an objectively terrible idea since it meant students would only have two days to process the Tuesday lecture material, before it was tested that same Thursday.

Fig. 2 Scheduling options for Midterms

Therefore, I decided to schedule the Midterms on the Tuesdays of Weeks 3 and 5 (Fig. 2, Option 2). This way, students would have a whole week to process the material before being tested on it, which I hoped would mitigate some concerns about the fast pace of summer session. In addition, because Midterm 2 fell relatively close to the Final, presumably the material would remain fresher in students’ minds, reducing the amount they needed to review later. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? What I naively did not anticipate was how many students would skip the lectures in Week 4, especially the Thursday lecture, which was not tested on Midterm 2. I realized this flaw in my design halfway into the summer and did my best to encourage students to keep attending class so they wouldn’t fall behind or accumulate a backlog of material. But very understandably, since the most immediate priority was the Midterm, many students did end up skipping the Thursday class — which led to an incredibly stressful Week 5. And truth be told, I totally get it. When time is limited, why not give yourself an extra three hours to prepare for the exam, since that’s the most proximal fire that needs putting out?

My decision to space out the Midterms in this way was incredibly polarizing. Half my class loved it for the reasons I hoped (many appreciated not having to relearn the Midterm 2 material for the Final) and told me to keep things the way they were. But a quarter of the class absolutely hated it and told me that Week 5 was extremely stressful, including a few students who told me the final week was actively harmful to their wellbeing. I think these negative experiences are reason enough for me to switch things up next summer when I teach this course again. Next year, I plan to schedule the Midterms outside of class time on the Fridays of Weeks 2 and 4 (Fig. 3). Even though I generally don’t like scheduling out-of-class exams (especially the disproportionate burden this puts on commuting students), I think that this is the best trade-off — students still get time to process the material, but we don’t end up scheduling two exams in Week 5. I also briefly flitted with the idea of just having one Midterm and one Final, but my concern is that this would make the Midterm too dense, and students wouldn’t have an opportunity to diagnose their understanding earlier in the course.

Fig. 3 My plan for next summer

All in all, this was a great lesson for myself on the importance of course structure. I still had a really fun time teaching the class, although by the time I started to bond with the students in week 4, the class was almost over. I also appreciated how my students, as always, were very understanding and kind in how they voiced their frustrations to me — even if they didn’t like my decisions, most understood the logistical constraints I was working under, and were very constructive in how they shared their feedback. All in all, I’d say this was a pretty good summer.

This coming fall is a big one for me. I’m teaching BIPN 100 again (fourth time!), but more importantly, my coworker Carlos Rojo and I are rolling out our new undergraduate anatomy course. There is still SO much work to be done to make that class a reality, but I’m glad I’ll have the familiar ground of BIPN 100 as counterpoint to the new class. Onwards to the fall!

Syllabus: Link