The Solution:

Leveraging the collaborative power of Osmosis’ medical education platform, built on years of learning science research, to create engaging, customizable solutions for their faculty and students.

Flipped Classroom Support and Content Supplementation 

“Students find Osmosis very helpful. That may have motivated faculty to check it out,” says Dr. Zheng.

“Our first year students and second year students use Osmosis most heavily, which is consistent with the structure of our doctoral curriculum. The first year and the second year focus more on the basic sciences content. That’s also the focus of the Osmosis content.”

While Osmosis’s extensive library includes tens of thousands of immersive videos, case-based questions, flashcards, and high-yield notes on physiology, pathology, pharmacology, clinical practice and more—it’s designed to support locally-created curriculum, not replace it.

“Faculty still do lectures in class, but they might assign Osmosis videos for the students to preview before coming to class and then review after the class. The Osmosis resources are used to supplement learning, not to replace faculty’s role in the classroom. It’s voluntarily used by faculty and it’s partially student-driven.”

Osmosis usage at UoP supports the flipped classroom model by helping faculty adopt this educational approach with greater ease and effectiveness. Since its inception in 2015, Osmosis has been paving the way for visual education in medicine. Developed and reviewed by MDs, PhDs, DDSs, and other subject-matter experts, all illustrated videos are created by certified or masters-level medical illustrators. Over 3.2 million students and 140+ institutional partners have received a consistent, high-quality, and engaging medical education tool in Osmosis.

Flashcard Use and Collaborative Content Creation 

One key feature of Osmosis is a favorite among students: flashcards. “The flashcards feature, especially the flashcard authoring tool where the student can create their own flashcards and share with their classmates, was highlighted by students as one of the most valuable features. The analytics showed that students used the flashcards created by their classmates a lot. They found the collaborative feature of flashcard development to be very helpful,” reports Dr. Zheng. 

Providing a platform where students can collaborate and engage in their course material with peers has had a positive impact on their overall engagement in the program, especially during those first two years of study.

“Providing students with meaningful technology-enhanced learning experiences is one of the school’s strategic directions.” says Dr. Zheng. “Osmosis helps us to address some of the challenges in teaching and learning. The interactive animation format of the Osmosis videos is very engaging and the explanation by the narrators is very clear.”

Co-created Custom Content

In an effort to further address content gaps, UoP sought a partnership with Osmosis that would bring their students the best learning experience possible. To help meet this objective, each institutional partner receives “white glove” service. Dedicated support staff are available to guide users on how to leverage each Osmosis feature in the context of their own curriculum. This ensures optimal performance that helps meet each institution’s unique needs.

Particular to UoP, opportunity arose for the development of customized dental education videos. This resulted in an UoP-Osmosis partnership that is transforming how their students care for patients.

The 36 jointly-created videos on dental specific topics give faculty “plug-and-play” visual resources that integrate seamlessly with their locally-created materials, meaning less effort for educators and a more enriching experience for their students.

The Challenge:

Supporting faculty to teach students a large amount of information in an engaging way that makes it feel relevant to their future practice.

Modern dental accreditation emphasizes the integration and impact of oral health on systematic and overall health of individuals. Now more than ever, it’s important for dental students to have a solid fund of medical knowledge.

"The students have such a large amount of information to master, especially basic science information. Some of the content could be perceived by some of the students to be dry and irrelevant to their practice in dentistry.”

Obtaining traditional student success metrics like test scores or lecture attendance is relatively easy. But, how can educators glean more objective information relating to learner engagement and attitude? 

“Student learning needs to be more broadly defined rather than only looking at the test scores. But, other domains of learning could be more challenging to measure like attitude or behavioral changes.“ 

The Result:

Increased faculty scholarship, better student performance, and an increase in UoP’s status as a leading dental school through openaccess learning materials.

Academic Scholarship

“One of the immediate impacts on our faculty is their scholarship. Our academic deans are very supportive of faculty scholarship of teaching and learning. Developing videos is a type of scholarship because faculty are developing innovative learning resources for students.” This translates into opportunities for faculty career advancement, partially stemming from the use of teaching innovations like Osmosis. 

More specifically, in 2020, Dr. Zheng and her colleagues, including the Dugoni School of Dentistry’s two academic deans, Dr. Cindy Lyon (Associate Dean for Oral Healthcare Education) and Dr. Daniel Bender (Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs), and two DDS students Kenji O’Brien (DDS 2021) and Dr. Kyle Cuenin (DDS 2020), conducted a school-wide study with all three of their Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) classes and the two international dental studies classes. The study sought to understand how students used Osmosis resources, from the videos to flashcards and collaborative workspaces—and how using these resources correlated with their content performance. “We found that, for first year students, the use of the Osmosis videos and the flashcards for self-assessment has a statistically significant positive correlation with their course grades and midterm and final exam performance in the basic science content areas of: Nutrition, biochemistry, anatomy and physiology.” 

In addition, the Osmosis analytics showed “that the majority of the flashcards that our students answered were the flashcards created by the students themselves…strong> a combination of the readily available flashcards in Osmosis and the ones developed by the end users. It is wonderful to see students support each other.” This study helps to highlight the importance of both collaborative learning and teaching innovation, which are some of the driving forces behind the success of the Osmosis platform. 

Dr. Zheng notes that the study, currently in review for publication, did not fully explain usage in other learner subgroups. For example, outcomes were not quite as strong in second year students. “There may be other learning resources our students have been using in addition to Osmosis. Other factors that might have impacted students’ learning performance need to be further investigated. But, we have some positive preliminary outcomes that we are very excited about.” 

“Faculty can turn teaching innovation into scholarship of teaching learning such as publications. This is also one of the strategies that I’ve been using to encourage faculty to implement teaching innovation. We do have many faculty who have published papers based on their teaching innovation,” says Dr. Zheng. 

In addition, the jointly-created dental education videos are serving UoP’s goals for an open education ecosystem where all dental education institutions can benefit and push the entire field forward. Those videos are available to all Osmosis subscribers as well as being hosted on the Osmosis YouTube channel. Dr. Zheng says, “The impact extends beyond the dental school at Pacific.” 

A May 2020 Journal of Dental Education paper, co-authored by Dr. Zheng, looked at the pedagogical effects of the UoP-Osmosis, co-created videos. It details promising results for the future of video production in dental education. 

In particular: 

“A recent survey conducted with 257 students in the dental school demonstrated that 86% of students agreed or strongly agreed the Osmosis resources were helpful for their learning, and 92.2% of students perceived the Osmosis videos as somewhat valuable, valuable or highly valuable for learning.”¹ 

Students reported that supplementing locally-created lectures with Osmosis videos led to easier and faster learning, with the ability to speed up or slow down content to learn at their own pace.

¹ Morandini AC, Ramos-Junior ES, Zheng M, Desai R. Embracing video production as a powerful tool in dental education. J Dent Educ. 2020;1–2.https://doi.org/10.1002/jdd.12246

Student Usage Patterns and Interventions

Furthermore, Dr. Zheng also notes that, “Students have been using Osmosis heavily as demonstrated in the Osmosis analytics.” These metrics provide quantitative data that demonstrate learner usage patterns and their engagement with the material. This makes situations like student remediation much easier to observe and address. 

Access to this individualized, granular data helps create an environment where faculty can be proactive educators and help students perform at their best, which has been critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty had to “shift the focus of the learning from a one way street delivery of the content to more interactive discussions among the students in the classroom.” With access to Osmosis, faculty had a tool to help them transition and provide quality learning materials to their students without the burden of development. 

“We hope faculty will continue to flip their classroom and implement blended learning... Over the past year during the campus closure, more faculty have been using Osmosis to supplement student learning. We hope that the innovations they have implemented during this past year can be continued into a post-pandemic world.” 

This is a likely outcome, as student buy-in on the Osmosis platform appears high. “Some students ask for access to Osmosis after they graduate. A student who graduated last year is now on part-time faculty in our dental school. She asked, ‘How can I access the platform? I used to have access. Do I have access now as faculty?’ I said, ‘Sure!’ Another unexpected outcome.” 

This signals a valuable learning support tool in Osmosis that faculty can use to support student engagement. This promotes a passion for lifelong learning and, ultimately, better patient care. 

“Faculty’s implementation of innovative resources like Osmosis has contributed to improved student learning,” says Dr. Zheng. “When faculty see the benefits of teaching in alternative ways, and pedagogical value of technology integration, they are motivated to integrate them in their teaching to support student learning.”