Elevating student potential: creating digital video to teach neurotransmission

Students today have unprecedented access to technology, the Internet, and social media. Their nearly ubiquitous use of these platforms is well documented. Given that today's students may be primed to learn using a different medium, incorporating various technological elements into the classroom in a manner compatible with traditional approaches to teaching becomes a challenge. We recently designed and implemented a strategy that capitalized on this knowledge. Students in their first neuroscience course were required to create a 3-5 minute digital video using video-making freeware available on any Mac or PC. They used images, text, animation, as well as downloaded music to describe the fundamental process of neurotransmission as it applies to a topic of their choice. In comparison to students taught using other more traditional approaches to demonstrate the process of neurotransmission, we observed that students who took part in the video-making project exhibited better understanding of the neurological process at multiple levels, as defined by Bloom's revised taxonomy. This was true even of students who had no aspirations of pursuing a Neuroscience career, thus suggesting that there was an overall increased level of student engagement regardless of personal career interests. The utility of our approach was validated by both direct and indirect assessments. Importantly, this particular strategy to teaching difficult concepts offers a high degree of flexibility allowing it to potentially be incorporated into any upper-level Neuroscience course.