Undergraduate performance in a domestic animal laboratory taught via distance education

Animal sciences undergraduate education since the ASAS centennial: a national survey and scoping review

The rapid pace of advancement in animal sciences is drastically changing conditions for undergraduate teaching and learning in the discipline. Shortly after the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) centennial, we conducted a national survey of 90 faculty instructors from 49 academic institutions to assess their perceptions of emerging teaching topics. Participants rated 18 learning outcomes (LO) and 16 types of courses and experiences (CE) with respect to their importance and the adequacy of available offerings. This study presents the results of the survey along with a scoping review of animal sciences teaching and learning publications since 2008 (n = 71). Results indicated that discipline-specific competencies and core experiential learning remain central to animal sciences teaching and identified several distinct needs for research. Namely, we suggest that future research in animal sciences teaching and learning 1) develop animal-science-specific expertise on a greater variety of pedagogies, 2) validate improved methods for assessing transferable skills, 3) expand pedagogical knowledge of emerging topics (e.g., sustainability, data science, welfare science, social science), and 4) deepen and broaden animal sciences’ teaching and learning identity through theory-building work and collaborations across instructors, disciplines, and institutions.

IVET, an Interactive Veterinary Education Tool

The use of e-learning tools for medical teaching is a common practice, but similar tools do not exist for veterinary teaching. In this article, we present a fully web-based e-learning platform, denoted Interactive Veterinary Education Tool (IVET), which is designed to support teaching and learning in veterinary science. To make content creation easier, it provides theory, exercise, and image editors with functionalities to prepare exercises and theoretical content including 2-dimensional (2D) images, 3-dimensional (3D) models, and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) files, which can be manipulated by the users. It supports different types of exercises such as quizzes, 2D and 3D location exercises, and exercises based on multiplanar reconstructions from a set of animal scans (DICOM files). In addition, a correction strategy is defined for each type of exercise to automatically correct them and avoid the teacher to perform this process manually. All data are stored in a central repository, including the material prepared by the teacher and the solutions sent by the students, from which the system is able to compute some statistics, such as the evolution of the students and the final score of a course. By this way, teachers can use this information to carry out continuous assessment. All the resources such as 2D images, 3D models, and DICOM files are stored in the multimedia repository, included in the central one. To obtain real 3D models from animal scans, a manual segmentation process is also described. The platform has been reviewed by a group of teachers through an experimental test, and its functionalities have been compared with other veterinary e-learning tools from the literature.