2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Biomedical engineering (BME) is a highly interdisciplinary field, combining traditional engineering disciplines with biology and medicine. Because of this interdisciplinary nature, many BME courses naturally lend themselves to a team teaching model, where expertise of multiple instructors can be brought together to enhance and deepen student learning. Team teaching in other disciplines has been shown to enhance student learning and can also benefit the instructors of teaching team (1,2). To achieve these benefits, the instructors must work effectively as a team and consciously incorporate the strength of team teaching into the course design (3,4). However, little research has been done on this process, specifically how to collaboratively develop/redesign courses for a team teaching model and how to create effective teaching dynamics within the team. The goal of this work was to develop methods that foster the development of effective teaching teams through the development/redesign of graduate BME courses. The authors developed a series of six virtual workshops modifying the Course Design Institute (CDI) curriculum (5) to facilitate collaborative design of five BME courses and co-creation of team competencies and values that will lead to effective learning and team teaching outcomes. To measure the outcomes from these workshops and how they contribute to developing effective teaching teams, two surveys were created to measure BME faculty participants’ perception of the effects of this workshop series on their course development and team teaching skills. The anonymous surveys will be administered to workshop participants (n=15). Survey items were adapted from instruments used to evaluate academic programs using Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Model (6). The first survey was disseminated in May 2022, assessing Kirkpatrick’s Level 1 and 2, Reaction and Learning. Results from this survey indicated that over 80 % of participants strongly agreed or agreed that the workshop series “aided my role as an effective member of a teaching team” and “will help me to meet my teaching goals”. The second survey assessing Level 3 - Behavior will be sent in November of 2022, when teams have produced a syllabus for their team-taught course. We expect to analyze the quantitative and qualitative data from both surveys in the winter of 2022. We expect participants will report an improvement in team competencies and values that will lead to effective learning and team-teaching outcomes. Over the next year as these teaching teams deliver the developed courses, we plan to extend this study to examine Kirkpatrick’s Level 4 - Results by measuring student outcomes. By sharing the process for modifying a CDI to support the collaborative development of courses and teaching teams, and the results of the workshop series evaluation, this work will provide strategies for the BME community towards adopting an effective team teaching model.

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2. Leavitt, M. D. Team Teaching: Benefits and Challenges. (2006).
3. Sharpe, R & Oliver, M. Designing for Learning in Course Teams. in Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (Routledge, 2013).
4. Voogt, J. et al. Collaborative design as a form of professional development. Instr Sci 43, 259–282 (2015).
5. Palmer, M. Streifer, A. Williams Duncan S. Systematic Assessment of a High Impact Course Design Institute. To improve the academy 35, 2 (2016)
6. Alsalamah, A. & Callinan, C. Adaptation of Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Model of Training Criteria to Evaluate Training Programmes for Head Teachers. Education Sciences 11, 116 (2021).