Improving student online engagement and enhancing the ability of tutors to analyse student knowledge; use of an MCQ during an online tutorial

Introduction/Background & aims:
Developing new online teaching approaches is important during the Covid-19 era.[1] We designed a tutorial using our online teaching system Keats, based on the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS). The aim was to develop a tutorial to support learning that involved an MCQ followed by discussion of the answers. Specifically, we wanted to focus on areas that were understood less well, as determined by the MCQ outcome.

Method/Summary of work:
At KCL, we run two ‘Immunopharmacology of Inflammation’ modules, in a similar manner, for final year students. Group A is a 15-credit module, whereas Group B is a 30-credit module including practical teaching.

Students were given 40 questions with 5 choices for each at the beginning of the tutorial for 30 min, with no negative marking. Immediately after the MCQ, the tutors were able to assess where the students appeared to lack knowledge. The remaining time was then spent discussing these areas.

At the request of the students, we have now developed a broader MCQ with the wrong answers explained. The students can view this on Keats at any time.

Results/Discussion:
Data from 15 students who attended the tutorials and completed the MCQ are shown for Groups A and B (Figure 1).

Figure 2 shows comparison between the average grades. As predicted, Group B which has more teaching achieved better grades than Group A.

Conclusion(s):
We have developed an MCQ-linked online tutorial to assess the competency of students, in terms of understanding inflammatory concepts. The analysis of performance for each question sheds light on the weakness and strengths of knowledge, allowing the tutors to determine what would be best to discuss.

The students generally gave positive feedback, asking us to extend the MCQ to give feedback on all questions and to allow open access. This provides a sustainable educational tool as the students can retake the quiz at any time. The individual feedback for each question allows increased learning and improved approaches for answering these and similar questions in the future.

Our next plan is to link the MCQs with short animation videos that have been designed primarily by Dr Hammad to further explain the Immunopharmacology of Inflammation.