How Much Zoom is Too Much Zoom? Striking the balance in blended courses.
Concurrent Session 4
Brief Abstract
This session will explore data gathered from various blended formats to try to better determine effectiveness of long zoom sessions for synchronous online learning. Specific focus will be on how to strike a balance between long zoom sessions for convenience, while not keeping learners online for too long a period.
Extended Abstract
AO North America provides continuing medical education to a community of surgeons and veterinary surgeons in North America and around the world. Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak in March of 2020, AO North America provided the majority of our courses in a traditional face to face learning environment. These courses consisted of lecture, case discussion, and lab activities. The Covid-19 outbreak forced us to go completely online for the better part of 2020 and into 2021. In that time, we implemented a new LMS platform and replaced our previous video conferencing platform with zoom. Zoom’s webinar management system allowed us to automate several of our processes and made the process of scaling our operations much more manageable. Our courses were delivered both synchronously through zoom, and asynchronously through the LMS or a combination of both.
Once travel restrictions and social distancing restrictions eased, it was decided by our board, our Chief Education Officer, and our faculty to move to a blended approach. Lecture and case discussion would continue to be done online with learners and faculty traveling on site to complete the lab portion. Originally the course was designed in the learning management system and consisted of modules made up of mini lectures, quizzes, and links to live sessions. Learners would watch the lectures (created in a SCORM package to ensure they were viewed) which would unlock an assessment based on the lecture material. Completion of the quiz would unlock a link to the live session. Our most popular course is “Basic Principles of Fracture Management” which is geared toward resident orthopedic surgeons. The course consists of 8 modules based on the above-mentioned format. Each module would have a 1 hour live zoom session at the conclusion of each module. Learners would need to complete at least 7 of the 8 modules to be able to attend the live lab.
Committing to being online at a designated time once a week across multiple time zones soon proved to be a burden for both learners and faculty. It was then decided the live zoom sessions would be condensed into one weekend after learners completed all of the modules. This prompted an important question, “How much zoom is too much zoom?”. It was proposed by the faculty that the weekend zoom sessions would run for 6 hours on day 1, and 6 hours on day 2. There was a great deal of concern voiced by the Manager of Digital Learning, who designed these courses and built them in the LMS, that learners would reach their cognitive load and important information needed for the lab activities would not be retained. However, finding research on cognitive load in the synchronous online learning environment proved to be difficult. It was then decided to shorten the zoom sessions to 4 hours for each day.
This session will explore the data gathered on learning outcomes from the various formats of the “Basic Principles of Fracture Management” course. The data collected will seek to better determine the effectiveness of zoom sessions for synchronous online learning and how to strike a balance between condensing sessions for the sake of convenience while preventing learners from hitting their cognitive loads in long zoom sessions.