Another example of my passion about teaching and scholarly activity in the field of education, is my involvement in the development process of several courses here at UBC. For example, as the lead TA for the course BMEG 250 for the past two years (2019 and 2020), together with the course instructor (Dr. Vikramaditya Yadav); I have designed and developed a project-based learning activity currently being implemented in the course (see section 4.1, BMEG 250 teaching intervention and section 8.2). For example, in 2019 an open-ended question concerning drug development for Parkinson disease was imposed to the students in which they would have to apply bioinformatics knowledge gained in the laboratory section of the course and suggest a (structurally and thermodynamically) suitable drug candidate. The effectiveness and value of this approach for student learning was assessed and the results were presented in our CEEA 2019 publication (Paper #6).
A more recent example of curriculum development activity that I have been involved in is the brand new course BMEG 372 (see section 4.1, BMEG 372 teaching intervention) which is being taught by Dr. Gabrielle Lam for the first time at the time of writing this application. For this course as well, as a senior TA (2020), I have implemented an open-ended project as the backbone of the course; and despite regular course projects with end of term deliverables. This was designed as an iterative/interactive process in which students work on the project throughout the term and constantly receive feedback from their peers as well as the teaching team to evolve their proposed design for a novel drug delivery system to help type1 diabetes patients.
A third example is an ongoing effort with Dr. Gabrielle Lam who is also the instructor in charge of the course BMEG 102 to adopt the design-centred laboratory activates currently being implemented in the course, to an online-friendly platform; where all students can be engaged and learn the basic introductory concepts of biomedical engineering, in a comparable way as they would do in pre-COVID era.
Here too, instead of simply switching video recordings of the lab procedures being done by an expert TA, I implemented a combination of interventions to ensure maximum student engagement and benefit from the course. As an example of these interventions, I can mention the use of UBC’s video annotation tool (CLAS) to encourage student engagement; as well as having some intentional errors and mistakes in the experimental procedure being demonstrated in the video which encourages students to pay a close attention to be able to catch those errors.
I have also proposed a design-based syllabus for a 4th year level course in tissue engineering and a project-based syllabus (centered around a disease) for an upper year undergraduate physiology and anatomy course (Available upon request). Note both these have been done as my practicum for course design and development and have not been implemented in an actual university settings yet.