Teaching Human Gross Anatomy to the Home-Based Electronic Learner Without Cadaver Dissection (1998-2002)

Abstract

Over the past decade, electronic learning (EL) has become an established method for delivering courses as many colleges and universities try to expand their pool of potential applicants and serve an aging and geographically diverse student population. To accommodate this pool of potential applicants, the East Carolina University (ECU) Department of Physician Assistant Studies started an EL curriculum to train primary health care providers. ECU faculty have previously reported on the broader aspects of teaching distance learning to the physician assistant (PA) students at home.1 Here we report our experience with teaching human gross anatomy course to PA students without cadaver dissection. From 1984 to 1997, instruction in gross anatomy for allied health students used cadaver dissection and intranet-based library multimedia tools. The gross anatomy EL course (1998) was the first course in the curriculum to be taught to the PA electronic learners. The EL gross anatomy course had two major problems to overcome. The first was, “How do we teach human gross anatomy without the ELs dissecting the cadaver?” The second challenge was, “How do we get the beginning EL students to adapt to computer-based instruction and improve their Internet skills, allowing them to succeed in an 11-week summer session course?” The second challenge was discussed by Heinan, while Winn et al addressed the issue of using the Internet to teach a subject matter by means of high definition graphics.1,2 But other problems and results specific to teaching gross anatomy to ELs were not addressed. In this article, we discuss the specific problems and results of teaching human gross anatomy—which has traditionally been a laboratory intensive course—to the home-based electronic learner. To replace the dissection lab, the PA faculty proposed using a broadband Internet-based approach to deliver the course’s educational objectives. A review of the literature showed that the inclusion of CAI in an anatomy course would probably not negatively affect the learning process and would likely permit the electronic learning students obtain course objectives in reduced time.3 But these studies involved various faceto-face teaching modalities using CAI to augment, not replace, cadaver dissection.4 Nevertheless, based on this literature, we redesigned the PA electronic learning course to extend these studies a step further—to deliver the gross anatomy course without laboratory cadaver dissection. In the first EL course for PA students, we relied heavily on the Gold Standard Multimedia Inc.—on-line dissector for gross anatomy and radiology. Several FTF courses and at least one other on-line course from other universities have used this system.4-6 We have also used the Gold Standard dissector (GSM.com) for both FTF and the EL sections. In the 2000 EL course, a series of high-resolution images for each laboratory were taken from each day’s FTF lab dissection and was