MUSE: A look back at Dr. Fares Gouzi's winning project "Laboratoire Numérique de Sciences Précliniques" (Digital Laboratory for Preclinical Sciences)

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In 2018, Doctor Fares GOUZI took part in the MUSE call for projects aimed at supporting the pedagogical transformation of training courses. He emerged as the winner with his project entitled "Laboratoire Numérique de sciences précliniques".

 

What is MUSE "Take-Off"?

The MUSE project Montpellier University of Excellence "mobilizes the strengths of 16 institutions towards a common ambition: to create a research-intensive thematic university in Montpellier, internationally recognized for its impact in fields related to agriculture, the environment and health, likely to become an academic partner for all the members of the consortium, to which they will have strong links and which they will be able to draw on.

Through these "Take Off" calls for projects, it supports the pedagogical transformation strategy of the institutions and components of the MUSE consortium. In 3 years, the I-SITE MUSE has mobilized €6 million to support pedagogical innovations through this program. The "Laboratoire Numérique de Sciences Préclinique" project is one of those selected for Take-Off #1. Find out more in this article!

Docteur Gouzi's project is in line with MUSE's intentions

Dr. Gouzi was one of the winners of MUSE's Take Off 1 project, aimed at supporting pedagogical transformation. To better understand Doctor Gouzi's project, we need to start by understanding what pre-clinical sciences are. These pre-clinical disciplines form the basis of the1st cycle of health studies. There are seven of them: Anatomy, Histology, Embryology, Biophysics, Physiology, Cell Biology, Biochemistry... and they are studied in the 2nd and 3rd years of health studies.

Before Dr. Gouzi's project was set up, pre-clinical disciplines were mainly studied through lectures. These lectures accounted for 77% of their courses in these disciplines.

Find out more on video

 

Teachers at the heart of the project

To bring his project to fruition, Dr. Gouzi, who also teaches physiology, mobilized his medical and teaching colleagues to form the Groupe de Réflexion pour l'Enseignement des Sciences Pré-Cliniques en Santé (GRESP). Together, they created the Groupe de Réflexion pour l'Enseignement des Sciences Pré-cliniques en Santé (GRESP), a group of a dozen volunteer teachers who met twice a month for several hours over the course of a year to reflect on the project.

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A reorganization project

As mentioned above, lectures have come to dominate the teaching of health studies. The GRESP project aims to reorganize teaching and integrate more practical work and tutorials. To implement the project, the teachers have chosen the Teaching Unit entitled "Respiratory Apparatus", which is a UE studied in the 2nd year of health studies. The ultimate aim is to combine active teaching with a multi-disciplinary approach.

 

But then, what is it? :

 

  • Active teaching

    Active pedagogy aims to involve students in the learning process. Instead of simply listening and digesting information, students reflect, manipulate, annotate and interact with each other and with the teacher. This practice requires the formation of smaller groups of students. This is why, with the GRESP project, lectures have been reduced from 77% to 34%, to make way for more practical work and directed teaching.

  • Multidisciplinarity

    Multidisciplinarity is the coexistence of several disciplines working on the same subject. In the case of the GREPS project, this was achieved by completely reorganizing the various courses in the "Respiratory Apparatus" EU. Students no longer study the seven pre-clinical disciplines separately, but rather simultaneously. Courses have been broken down by organ, and each discipline is dealt with simultaneously through a particular organ.

A long process of setting up

 

To technically implement this project, the GREPS members made a number of modifications:

- As mentioned above, they first changed the ratios of the different types of courses, considerably reducing the number of hours of lectures, replacing them with practical work and tutorials. However, the total number of hours has remained unchanged, to avoid increasing student workload and to comply with the current reform.

- Then they modified the course content to incorporate more active teaching and multi-disciplinarity. To achieve this, a number of new features were introduced:

  • The creation of teaching scenarios for the various subjects in the "Respiratory equipment" course.

  • Thanks to the creativity of the teachers, they were also able to set up digital tools to illustrate the different scenarios (e.g. visiblebody: a digital tool representing a human body in 3D where each part of the body can be removed, analyzed and dissected, enabling students to do practical anatomy work online and free of charge).

  • The creation of a space on Moodle: with a space that takes up the structuring by objective and allows students to work from home, on a regular basis.

  • The use of non-digital tools such as models to help students understand more easily than with a diagram.

  • Use of videos: e.g. live syncope: students have to think about what happened to find out what caused the syncope. They then check their hypotheses using the software provided.

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A useful pedagogical transformation

  • The aims of this project are to develop students' pre-clinical science skills by introducing them to reasoning and the experimental approach. But also by making them think and understand things more dynamically.

  • The aim, for those involved in the project, was also to restore meaning and coherence to pre-clinical science instruction. They wanted to create a logical learning path from which students would be able to extract more knowledge.

But does it work?

 

  • Usefulness and acceptability

    In collaboration with Professor André Tricot, an educational psychologist specializing in digital teaching, Dr. Gouzi has set up evaluation methods to measure the usefulness and acceptability of such a project, as well as of digital tools in the learning process. To this end, they have drawn up questionnaires for students, which they administer every year.

  • Learning

    Then, to assess whether these practices are proving effective, self-quizzes are made available to students. This enables GREPS members to see whether the lessons have been properly assimilated and understood. In this way, they can see which solutions are helping students to understand and which, on the contrary, are slowing down learning. Thanks to these self-quizzes, lessons can be adjusted over time.

  • Practices

    Finally, an evaluation of changes in student learning practices will be carried out in the future. This will enable us to analyze the way they work. The aim is to reduce the need for students to assimilate knowledge by rote, in favor of continuous, long-term work.

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A project underway since 2019

This project, effective since 2019 within the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier-Nîmes, has enabled the realization of many other things:

  • Firstly, this project is a pilot for the hybridization of teaching. Although this was not the main objective at the outset, the courses taught in this teaching unit are both distance and face-to-face. In the face of the current health crisis, it provides an example of how to redesign courses in a hybrid way.
  • At the same time, this project is a pilot for the new reform. In fact, the new PASS/LAS reform for access to health studies has led to changes in the 2nd and 3rd years. If the effectiveness of active pedagogy and multidisciplinarity can be proven, this model can be transferred to other teaching units, faculties or branches.
  • Finally, from a scientific point of view, the evaluations that have been or will be carried out will enable us to prove the usefulness, in terms of learning, of such a project.

 

Publication 1 in pedagogy by Docteur Gouzi

Publication 2 in pedagogy by Docteur Gouzi

Contact Doctor Gouzi

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