Implementing a challenge-based learning experience in a bioinstrumentation blended course

Alejandro Santos-Díaz*, Luis Montesinos*, María Barrera-Esparza, Maria del Mar Perez-Desentis, David E. Salinas-Navarro

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Background: Bioinstrumentation is essential to biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate education and professional practice. Several strategies have been suggested to provide BME students with hands-on experiences throughout the curriculum, promoting their preparedness to pursue careers in industry and academia while increasing their learning and engagement. This paper describes the implementation of challenge-based learning (CBL) in an undergraduate bioinstrumentation blended course over the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: The CBL experience was implemented in a third-year bioinstrumentation course from the BME program at Tecnologico de Monterrey. Thirty-nine students enrolled in two sections formed fourteen teams that tackled blended learning activities, including online communication, lab experiments, and in-person CBL activities. Regarding the latter, students were challenged to design, prototype, and test a respiratory or cardiac gating device for radiotherapy. An institutional student opinion survey was used to assess the success of our CBL implementation. Results: Student responses to the end-of-term survey showed that they strongly agreed that this course challenged them to learn new concepts and develop new skills. Furthermore, they rated the student-lecturer interaction very positively despite the blended format. Overall, students assessed their learning experience positively. However, implementing this CBL experience required a substantial time increase in planning, student tutoring, and constant communication between lecturers and the industry partner. Conclusion: This work provides an effective instance of CBL for BME education to improve students’ learning experience despite decreased resource efficiency. Our claim is supported by the student’s performance and the positive feedback from our industrial partner.
Original languageEnglish
Article number510
Number of pages10
JournalBMC Medical Education
Volume24
Issue number1
Early online date8 May 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 8 May 2024

Bibliographical note

Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Keywords

  • Educational innovation
  • Bioinstrumentation
  • Challenge-based learning
  • Biomedical engineering
  • Higher education

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