Tim Reynolds
Abstract
Incorporating social media as a pedagogical tool in a course I teach uses creativity to strengthen course content retention.
In a face-to-face, undergraduate course I teach, Anatomy & Physiology I/ II, I provide TikTok, a social media platform consisting of short videos, to present course materials engagingly. Anatomy & Physiology, required of most students in the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance, is notoriously one of the more intimidating courses within the health science department, due to the vastness of the material, emphasis on memorization, and often being one of the first true introductions into a student’s desired career path.
The course is prerequisite to majors including physical therapy, occupational therapy, athletic training, exercise science, health promotion and physical education, and pre-med. One hundred-eighty students are in the class. Half of the students are first year and sophomores, and the remainder are primarily in their junior year. The course runs for roughly 16-weeks (an entire semester).There are two lectures per week (Tuesday and Thursday) which last 75-minutes and one lab per week (which lasts one hour and fifty minutes).
To meet the challenge of having students remember course content beyond the duration of our class, I provide 30-60 second videos on TikTok. As Zhu et al. (2022) explain, viewing a short video, on an important course topic, has positive effects on students’ engagement, longer-term memory, and exam performance.
In the TikTok videos, I provide demonstrations (which I call “Unique Explanations”), small practice quizzes, and posts that encourage students’ collaborative engagement with me. Viewing and engaging with TiKTok videos is an opportunity for students to practice course material outside of designated study times. I try to post TikTok videos daily, but this depends on my ability to generate new content.
Not all topics are easy for which to generate short form content. However, I try, at least, to post a series of quiz style questions that include information from the lecture, to provide students with a low stakes practice opportunity.
Unique Explanations
“Unique Explanations” TikTok Video
There are often one or two especially challenging topics within each unit of Anatomy and Physiology that students struggle to grasp. Often these are concepts I hope students will retain after the completion of their Anatomy and Physiology coursework. These can range from tracing a drop of blood throughout the body, to understanding which nerves allow certain muscles to contract.
My approach to help students understand and remember course concepts is to record concise videos (less than one minute), using either white board depictions or moving my body to a beat, to demonstrate material presented during lecture.The videos are emailed to the cohort following the given lecture. Since the videos are emailed to students, going to TikTok’s platform in order to view the videos is optional.
These videos, which I call “unique explanations” demonstrate to students how drawings or movement/dance can be used as part of a studying process. During in-class examinations, I often see students replicating the way I moved around in a video, in order to help themselves cognitively access the physiology concept. The feedback I have received from this teaching approach has been extremely positive. One student was quoted in Krom (2022) as saying:
As someone who is always on their phone either for pleasure or for school, adding a fun way to
actively learn on your own time is 100% useful. I really enjoyed using this new platform for learning, it
made learning this challenging material fun! (n.p)
Small Practice Quizzes
One of the most common requests I receive from students are for more practice question opportunities. I previously incorporated Kahoot quizzes during lectures for a low-risk learning assessment. I received a significant amount of positive feedback from providing Kahoot quizzes and was inspired to post daily “quizzes” on TikTok based on this response.
Our TikTok video quizzes utilize either a multiple-choice test or true/false style of questioning and incorporate questions similar in style to what will be asked on a lecture exam. Encouraging the scaffolding approach of “retrieval practice” through examinations has been shown to be extremely effective, as displayed in one study where students who quizzed themselves on vocabulary terms remembered nearly fifty percent more words than students who studied the words by repeatedly reading them over (Karpicke & Roediger III, 2008).
Over the course of a week, students may gain access to over 20 additional questions with which they can practice, without any grade repercussions or stress of answering in front of their peers. I then challenge students to develop practice questions of their own, and I use these student generated questions as a template, which, once again, encourages students to process course material beyond what is stated in class.
Side-By-Side Videos
TikTok Duet allows you to record your own video and play it alongside the video of another user. For several topics throughout the semester (e.g. drawing the brachial plexus or learning the dermatomes of the upper extremity), for one bonus point, I allow students to create a video that demonstrates the same knowledge as one of my videos, on a given subject matter. Then, my video and the student’s video are shown together in a TikTok split screen.
Our Duet videos create discussions among class members, as students watch their classmates’ videos and on theTikTok platform and comment on them, creating a fun environment for the involved students.While the one bonus point plays a minimal role in altering a student’s overall grade point average, it rewards students for the vulnerability associated with demonstrating important course content on TikTok, a platform typically designed for entertainment, and sharing it with their peers, also on TikTok. These side-by-side videos serve to further solidify the student presenters’ knowledge, and use the presenters’ knowledge and creativity to benefit classmates’ learning.
TikTok Alternative
In addition to posting content on TikTok, I post similar extra learning opportunities on Instagram. This platform has allowed for me to engage with students not only through scheduled posts, but through the Instagram “story” feature. With TikTok’s future uncertain, Instagram will allow me to continue to provide educational opportunities through social media.
Deeper Learning Outcomes
Though the overall cognitive focus of Anatomy and Physiology is memorization, there are indicators that viewing my physiology and anatomy TikTok videos and students creating physiology and anatomy TikTok videos can segue to deeper learning and thinking that ideally will be strengthened and sustained as students go further in their studies and future careers.
Creativity for challenge-solving. A deeper learning outcome is using critical/careful thinking and creativity for challenge solving. My physiology TikTok videos incorporate fun dance-like motions to demonstrate body functions. Viewing my creativity to demonstrate teaching physiological functions, students realize they can use creativity as a tool to help them learn and demonstrate what they know.
Evidence of students using creativity to help access their knowledge occurs during course examinations, when I observe students enact dance movements I or they used in TikTok videos to help them remember body parts and functions. Evidence of using creativity to solve challenges also occurs in students’ TikTok videos, when they incorporate fun gestures and movements to help classmates learn the physiology function. Providing TikTok videos has had a positive effect on students’ material retention and students’ ability to communicate what they know, as evidenced with higher tests scores in my classes and in students’ future graduate courses.
Reflections
Considering this coursework serves as the foundation for many future healthcare professionals, grasping the material beyond simply regurgitating information found on a notecard is one of the many goals of my instruction. Initially, I was reluctant to challenge traditional pedagogical approaches regarding teaching about the human body, but it has been one of the best investments into my development as a professor.
Over the year and a half I have been providing Anatomy and Physiology course TikTok videos, I have refined my video creating process regarding videos’ focus, variety, length, and my overall video creation process (see Would you like to create a TikTok video for your students? above). Currently, it takes approximately 15 minutes to produce each video (which includes thinking of content, recording the video, editing, and uploading). Since I am able to reuse the videos year after year, this small investment of time pays dividends in the future.
This generation of students will forever be unique, in that several years of course delivery was through online platforms. Academics and educators must be willing to challenge their traditional teaching philosophies in order to accommodate a cohort that not only endured remote instruction but gained access to technology earlier in their education developmental stages. The multiple functionalities of smartphones and tablets allows for a whole new style of instruction to be unlocked, but we must be willing to embrace our own uncertainty and uncomfortableness to explore these opportunities for the betterment of our students.
References
Karpicke JD, Roediger HL III. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science,
319(5865):966-8.
Krom, K. (2022, September 21). Exercise science professor uses TikTok to
educate. The Ithacan. https://theithacan.org/44702/life-culture/lc-features/exercise-science-professor-uses-tiktok-to-educate/
Zhu J, Yuan H, Zhang Q, Huang PH, Wang Y, Duan S, Lei M, Lim EG, Song P.
(2022). The impact of short videos on student performance in an online-
flipped college engineering course. Humanities and Social Science Communications,
9(1):327. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01355-6
Tim Reynolds, PT, DPT, OCS, CSCS is Assistant Professor, Exercise Science and Athletic Training at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. Tim Reynolds can be reached at treynol2@ithaca.edu and t.reynolds1026@gmail.com.