The Great Escape: Utilizing digital escape rooms to enhance the education of physician assistant students in a virtual learning environment.
Presenters:
Christina Gonzales
Co-Presenter: Professor Angelica Urbina, MPAS, PA-C
Presentation Title:
The Great Escape: Utilizing digital escape rooms to enhance the education of physician assistant students in a virtual learning environment.
Abstract:
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has dramatically impacted the graduate education in Physician Assistant (PA) programs across the country. This pandemic has required faculty and students to rapidly transition from traditional face-to-face instruction to distance learning formats through virtual classrooms. To help maintain a fun and interactive learning environment, faculty of The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) PA program reimagined the traditional Escape Room into a team-based digital experience for didactic year PA students. Faculty with the PA program used free & readily available software (Google Slides/ Forms) to create interactive digital Escape Rooms in both the Intro to Clinical Medicine (ICM) course & Clinically Oriented Anatomy course. On the day of the activity, a Zoom session was initiated, and students were given instructions, assigned to break-out rooms and navigated with their groups through the escape room. The digital Escape Rooms created a fun opportunity for students to work in a team-based learning group and apply their knowledge to compete with the clock and escape before time ran out. Post-escape room surveys were administered to participating students and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Three different escape rooms were introduced to the UTRGV PA Class of 2022, two in the ICM course and one in the anatomy course. In results from the post-escape room survey, all of the students responded agree or strongly agree that the escape room helped them learn about the subject matter. Greater than 91% of the student participants loved all three Escape Room activities. These rave reviews have encouraged the faculty at UTRGV to continue to incorporate these Escape Rooms as an adjunct to the rigorous didactic curriculum. The successful incorporation of this game into multiple different courses increases the confidence that with small modifications, this method couple be used to help teach other subject matter across multiple disciplines. In a modern, post-COVID world where students are fighting to stay engaged with traditional pedagogy, digital escape rooms could potentially be modified to facilitate learning in any subject matter for the health professions student and beyond.
- The learner will explore of higher education faculty from traditional face-to-face instruction to distance learning formats through virtual classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The learner will develop a strategy for creating a digital Escape Room as a bridge for the application of knowledge, solidification of concepts.
- The learner will summarize the use of a digital Escape Room to build connections between classmates in the team based learning virtual classroom.
- The learner will discuss the use of gamification in the health professions classroom.