Asynchronous Polling: An Innovative Approach to Improving Effectiveness of Virtual Small Group Sessions

Abstract

Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), the largest allopathic school in the country, consists of 9 campuses with a single curriculum. Pre-pandemic, much of the content was delivered locally at each campus. Three weeks before the beginning of Neuroscience and Behavior, the final course of the first year, IUSM made the decision to transition to virtual learning because of the pandemic. Due to limitations in clinical availability, many of the clinical small group sessions were delivered as statewide, synchronous sessions via Zoom utilizing breakout rooms. These sessions generally consisted of about 370 students divided into 40 breakout rooms with 1-2 content experts for the entire class and a single session facilitator. Most sessions utilized a “boomerang” model in which students were sent to one of the 40 breakout rooms to work through 1-2 cases and associated questions, brought back to the main room for a full-class mini-discussion with the content experts, and sent back to breakout rooms to repeat the process with the next cases. In order to monitor the progress of the students through the cases, the “assign homework” function of the polling application Top Hat was utilized. Groups could answer questions asynchronously within the small groups. Answers could be monitored by the content experts in real-time. Messages were sent if groups were moving too slowly or too quickly through the cases. Being able to see the answers from the groups as they worked through the exercises enabled the full-class mini-discussions to be targeted on the concepts with which groups had trouble rather than on concepts that were well understood. Students were surveyed after each session. The majority of respondents agreed/strongly agreed that virtual delivery worked well (77%), pacing was good (69%), and overall the session was effective (74%). Many students appreciated returning to the main room for mini-discussions while their small group discussions and thought processes were still fresh on their minds. Student feedback was also collected at the end of the course with 67% of respondents agreeing/strongly agreeing that small group activities improved their understanding of course content which was similar to how the in-person small groups were rated the year before (71.6%). The ability for students to submit answers asynchronously and for these answers to be monitored in real-time was important for pacing and effectiveness of these large, virtual small group sessions.