I am currently the senior TA for the first offering of this brand-new course. My responsibilities included design and development of the course project, along with its assessments; as well as content development (which is done in consultation with the instructors of the pre-requisite courses), marking assignments and assays as well as helping during the midterm and final project presentations. I spent 2hr/week in summer developing the design project for the course and another 2hr/week to develop lecture contents. Now I mostly spend my time marking students’ work and helping them through the design process, as well as evaluating them in their presentations; which adds up to total of 48hr/term for 35 students in the third- and forth-year biomedical engineering program.
- Teaching Approach
For one of the modules that I have developed for this course (namely the release profile); I have generated several cases and device configurations of the drug delivery systems. Although these cases use the same mass transfer principles to estimate and predict the release profile of the therapeutic agents; each require a different mathematical approach in defining the imposed initial and boundary conditions. Building upon the previous mass transfer knowledge, they would also expand and cover systems involving moving boundary conditions (e.g. a hydrogel or biodegradable polymer, introduced in the previous modules of the course). I strongly believe this approach would integrate the theoretical knowledge of the pre-requisite courses with the practical framework of drug delivery systems in this course; and would help student understanding of these concepts which are to be applied to the final deliverable of their design project as well. These lectures are planned to be delivered in the second half of the course (in 2 weeks time from the time of this application).
- Teaching Interventions
This past summer, I worked very closely with the course instructor to develop the course project which serves as the backbone of the course; along with rubrics and evaluation criteria for assessing students. The biggest intervention currently being implemented in this course, is this open-ended project in which student teams tackling the same issue (type 1 diabetes) using different approaches and design different drug delivery systems to control and sustain the release of their therapeutic over a certain period. In the next step, team submissions are being assessed by their peers in other groups. Here, while teams are not penalised for peer comments, students are assessed individually based on the quality of the feedback provided. In the second deliverable student teams are required to respond to their peer-reviewers feedback and implement the requested revision to improve the quality of their work. I believe this iterative system is a well representative of the peer review for research publications and is great exercise for the students in terms being able to provide and receive constructive feedback.
- Challenges
This course is being offered online due COVID19 pandemic and one of the biggest challenges is to create a sense of community in the virtual setting. To this end, I have suggested to carve out some team-work time during the lectures so students can work together while receive real-time feedback from the instructor. Besides, having the design project where the same issue is being addressed with different approaches, really helps students to work together and generates a collaborative environment. Another challenge with regard to the first offering of this course, was to cover the wide ranges of the content under the umbrella of biomaterials and drug delivery; we have planned a relatively ambitious syllabus in the very first stages of course design. However, luckily with instructor’s flexibility, we are able to adjust the pace of the delivery of the content with the class need, spending more time here and there for in-class discussions and team work; which is believed to ultimately help student learning better than covering a lot of different concepts superficially.