A Case Study of Virtual Anatomy Museum: Facilitating Student Engagement and Self-paced Learning through an Interactive Platform

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalization of teaching and learning has been forced to be in place for effective remote and online education. Most learning platforms offer teacher-centered pedagogy and limited opportunities for self-paced learning. This project used Gather. Town, which is an online proximity-based video-conferencing platform with an ability to allow student interactions and self-paced learning. This case study aimed to evaluate Year 1 pharmacy students’ experiences and perceptions in learning through the virtual anatomy museum visit. The virtual anatomy museum was developed via Gather.Town and introduced to Year 1 pharmacy students from Taylor’s University, Malaysia enrolled in Human Anatomy and Physiology module in the August 2021 semester. Student experiences and feedback were collected using a self-administered questionnaire by using universal sampling. A total of 61 pharmacy students participated with a response rate of 93.9%. The majority of the students (82.0%) actively participated during the virtual visit. More than half of the students (52.5%) enjoyed the self-guided visit at their own pace and this was significantly associated with their pre-university education. The majority of students enjoyed (93.4%) and felt motivated (77.0%) during the virtual visit. From students’ qualitative responses, they found that the virtual museum provides a real-world environment with a self-paced learning mode, which helped them understand better in anatomy lectures. This study highlighted the implementation of virtual anatomy visit with Gather.Town platform that enhanced the students’ visit experience in terms of their engagement with self-paced learning. It could be used as an alternative platform for students in visit-based learning.