At a Glance
Institution:
St. Clair College
Instructor:
Dr. Andrea Pepper
Course Name:
Anatomy & Physiology
Course Material in Use:
VanPutte, Seeley's Essentials of Anatomy and Physiology, 11e
Resource in Use:
Connect + SmartBook
Course Type:
Face-to-face
Integration:
Blackboard
Course Enrollment:
300
The Challenge: Simplify Course Building
Before implementing Connect, Dr. Andrea Pepper struggled to build her course herself using other online platforms and material. She also found it difficult to encourage students to register for courseware properly. Other platforms required a lot of manual set-up on her part.
“With other online platforms we get a site and are told to build what we want, all the material is there. But with McGraw Hill they did all the set up for me.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Pepper decided to employ Connect in her Anatomy & Physiology course. Even after classes returned to in-person learning, she continued using Connect in her course. She has also begun the process of getting the cost of Connect included in first-year students’ tuition so that there are no barriers in accessing their courses’ online materials for the first week of class.
She currently assigns 21% of her course’s grades to be conducted via Connect including weekly quizzes, SmartBook assignments, and virtual labs.
“The McGraw Hill support is the reason we started using Connect. I don’t use any other products because of the lack of support.”
After employing Connect in her course, Dr. Pepper has found that students are more engaged with the material and they are attending class having spent more time with the material ahead of time. She has found it particularly helpful to utilize the student reports and insights tools in Connect to analyze student performance and identify students at risk of falling behind and who may require additional help. She spends the first part of each week reviewing questions that performed poorly so she can provide additional instruction in these topics and improve understanding of these difficult concepts.
Connect has also made her class time more efficient by allowing her to assign quizzes outside of class rather than needing to spend valuable in-class time conducting quizzes. This gives her enough time to teach course content and she can spend more time reviewing concepts that students struggle with.
“My students like being able to practice questions with the content. They like being able to earn some marks by other ways then traditional testing.”
Instructor Profile
Andrea Pepper is a professor in the School of Nursing at St. Clair College (Chatham Campus). Her teaching includes Anatomy and Physiology, Introductory Biology, and Statistics. She obtained her B.Sc. at the University of Western Ontario and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of Windsor. Andrea loves to see her students engaged and uses in-class demos to help create active learning in the classroom and is very grateful to be teaching our future health care providers.
Recommendations from Dr. Pepper
“Go all in. Use as much of the product that you can. The SmartBook and quizzes allow students to see the material weekly. Frequent, low stakes assessments are key to student success in difficult courses.”
“The biggest reason I recommend using Connect is the McGraw Hill Team. The support you get with implementation is spectacular.”