An active partnership: How engaging students as co‐producers will change your classroom
Authors: Bengtsson Fredrik , Granmo Marcus 
Published: November 2023

The digital revolution takes the concept of easy and immediate access to knowledge to the next level: students can now actively and directly participate in the creation and sharing of information and resources. The role of the teacher is now shifted away from “sage on the stage” and even away from “guide on the side” to an active partnership with the students as they create content. Students are no longer restrained by the formal physical and temporal requirements of a traditional course, their education has become more interactive and more flexible as students and faculty collaborate on educational outcomes. Here we present a cross‐faculty project where teachers and students from the medical and journalism programs collaborated to produce short movies of descriptive anatomy briefings on the medical program in Lund. The films gave the medical students free access to repeat and rehearse the curriculum over time. The journalism students on their part got to practice camera techniques, directing and editing: This created an opportunity for students to help students thus allowing for a deep sense of inclusion on both parts. Our role in this was to work together with the students in an active dialogue to fully integrate the curriculum and secure the pedagogical flow. We also describe a project where medical students developed and produced an in‐house simple, scalable mobile application designed to give students and teachers easy access to digital course material. Incorporating complementary digital learning resources, in particular integrated in mobile applications enabled us to meet students in their own digital setting, thereby enriching the learning process. User statistics show that the students use the multimedia material just prior to attending the traditional in‐class teaching situation. This flexible approach changed the pedagogic demand and thus the role of the teachers so that they now have to accommodate students already familiar with the curriculum. The use of the multimedia material has thus evolved the in‐class pedagogical approach from being mostly descriptive anatomy to instead focus on questions regarding functional aspects of the subject. As a result, teachers can now focus on doing what we do best: discuss and explain complex questions. The digital material is available online to all semesters of the medical education and thus provides excellent opportunities for repetition, reducing the risk of knowledge‐loss between basic and clinical parts of the program. Besides the obvious benefits for the students, the material gives teachers a clear overview of the anatomy curriculum and provides an easy way for recapitulation. The same material can also be used for alternative, more interactive forms of assessment as well as be shared in an international context. In the presentation we will share our experiences, the institutional frameworks that facilitated this work, discuss pros and cons in the process and present a how‐to guide to engage with learners at all levels of experience.

Support or Funding Information

This work was supported by the education board at Lund university and educational development funds from the faculty of medicine at Lund University