Redesigning Human Physiology Labs as Integrated Instructional Units with Comparative Parallel Mechanistic Analyses for Post‐COVID Online College Teaching

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges in remote online college teaching of human physiology is the lab component. To overcome this challenge, we redesigned our pre‐COVID face‐to‐face physiology labs with the objective of preserving most of their learning outcomes. Towards this end, we applied the concept of treating labs as integrated instructional units (America's Lab Report, https://www.nap.edu/read/11311/chapter/5). Our approach was to replace student hands‐on lab protocol focus with an integrative lab approach that allows the students to not only record data from real‐time, video‐recorded experiments, but also to map them out on the corresponding anatomical architecture and mechanisms under investigation. The video recordings were performed by the instructor synchronously during the class session then posted for the students online as part of an expanded lab package that includes instrumentation and protocol details, experimental parameters and variables, relevant anatomical and physiological mechanistic footnotes, as well as expected lab report format and rubric. Using this approach, physiology labs originally designed separately to investigate principles and mechanisms of diffusion, neuronal reflexes, EMG, ECG, and hemodynamics were replaced with integrated labs designed to allow side‐by‐side comparisons and provide stimulating visual demonstrations of empirical work and relevant mechanistic and anatomical architecture. Two such lab examples are: (1) comparing speedsof: (a) food dye diffusion in solution based on real‐time measurements in a glass plate aligned with measuring scales, (b) action potential conduction based on mapped‐out neuronal pathway lengths and online measurement of relevant reaction time (https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/redgreen.html), and (c) blood flow between the cardiac left ventricle and the site of pulse measurement in the finger based on vasculature anatomy and the time delay between the ECG's QRS electrical wave peak and onset of finger mechanical pulse wave, and (2) comparing time, amplitude, distribution, and discreteness of grip strength‐forearm EMG recording with that of the QRS and P‐wave of the ECG with emphasis on skeletal versus cardiac muscle electrophysiological mechanisms of action potential initiation and propagation as well as corresponding muscle mass as well as physiological mechanisms. Having successfully applied this new lab design in Fall 2020, more data is expected in Spring 2021 to be presented at the APS annual meeting in late April 2021.