A Case Study of Virtual Anatomy Museum: Facilitating Student Engagement and Self-paced Learning through an Interactive Platform

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalization of teaching and learning has been forced to be in place for effective remote and online education. Most learning platforms offer teacher-centered pedagogy and limited opportunities for self-paced learning. This project used Gather. Town, which is an online proximity-based video-conferencing platform with an ability to allow student interactions and self-paced learning. This case study aimed to evaluate Year 1 pharmacy students’ experiences and perceptions in learning through the virtual anatomy museum visit. The virtual anatomy museum was developed via Gather.Town and introduced to Year 1 pharmacy students from Taylor’s University, Malaysia enrolled in Human Anatomy and Physiology module in the August 2021 semester. Student experiences and feedback were collected using a self-administered questionnaire by using universal sampling. A total of 61 pharmacy students participated with a response rate of 93.9%. The majority of the students (82.0%) actively participated during the virtual visit. More than half of the students (52.5%) enjoyed the self-guided visit at their own pace and this was significantly associated with their pre-university education. The majority of students enjoyed (93.4%) and felt motivated (77.0%) during the virtual visit. From students’ qualitative responses, they found that the virtual museum provides a real-world environment with a self-paced learning mode, which helped them understand better in anatomy lectures. This study highlighted the implementation of virtual anatomy visit with Gather.Town platform that enhanced the students’ visit experience in terms of their engagement with self-paced learning. It could be used as an alternative platform for students in visit-based learning.

Using a Metaverse to Teach Students to Predict the Interaction of Acids and Bases Using Hard and Soft Acids and Bases (HSAB) Theory

“…A recent scoping review of empirical studies using the Gather.Town platform for educational purposes found that Gather.Town generally increased students’ satisfaction and engagement in a variety of courses including English language learning, , computer science, − anatomy, engineering, and statistical analysis . Despite the aforementioned research showing that engagement in social learning spaces is beneficial to students’ understanding of the instructional content in chemistry courses, there have been few examples in the literature of Gather.Town being used for chemistry-related contexts. − Furthermore, where Gather.Town has been used in chemistry contexts, it was used as a venue for conference poster sessions, primarily for professional chemists rather than as an instructional platform for students.…”