TSHS Spring Webinar Recap: Explore The Islands
Have you ever dreamed of teaching in the islands? While you may not be able to take your classes to the islands, you can bring The Islands to your classroom. Dr. Ann Brearley of the University of Minnesota takes us on such an adventure in this webinar: “Out of the Classroom and into the ‘Real’ World: Learning Statistics by Doing Statistics with ‘The Islands’ ”.
In her webinar, we see a great example of an instructor aligning a class with the recommendations of the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report. Ann promotes active learning in classrooms, and most of her courses are partially or fully flipped. Ann explains how doing statistics is more effective and more interesting than listening to someone talk about statistics. Ann believes that more complicated topics are better learned in a flipped classroom because students have direct access to the instructor and teaching assistants serving as statistical consultants. She uses this approach in her in-person and online biostatistics courses, ranging in size from 25 to 150 public health undergraduate students, graduate students, and/or medical and public health professionals. Ann’s goal is to make these service courses more active, relevant, and effective.
Exploring The Islands
In 2011, Dr. Michael Bulmer at the University of Queensland created the virtual world of The Islands. In 2012, faculty in the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota started a collaboration to add clinical and hospital features to facilitate medical studies. As you navigate around The Islands, you will find a Visitor Center with information about how the islands work, and an Academy, where you can explore examples of completed student projects. Each town has a Town Hall that lists all births, deaths, and marriages. The School provides the names of all children enrolled. Clinics show patients being treated for diseases and receiving antenatal care. At the Hospital, you can find cancer, cardiology, and immunology patient information. For more information, you can watch a video tour here. Ann explains how The Islands is a virtual world with no built-in mechanism for researchers to take a random sample or collect data. Since there is no global search facility, her students must be creative in how they search for eligible participants. For example, Ann recommends that her students visit the Schools to find children or the Hospitals and Clinics to identify individuals with certain diseases. While Hospitals and Clinics are useful for recruiting participants for clinical studies, Field Stations and Climate Stations that monitor the weather (e.g., rain and temperature) are useful for agricultural studies.
Practicing Public Health on The Islands
Each term, Ann requires her students to complete The Islands project. Students work in small groups to design, conduct, analyze, and report the results of their study in the form of a research paper or poster presentation. The data collection process mimics the real world. Islanders can be interviewed via text. Islanders can be “lost” if they are discharged from the hospital before students finish collecting their data. Islanders can refuse to participate in a study, lie, and may be unavailable for an interview at certain times (e.g., when sleeping at night), which can be challenging in different time zones. There is no study database on The Islands for collecting all history information and no built-in analysis software. Popular project examples include:
RE-WINE: The Effect of Red Wine on Serotonin Release
YIKES! Youth Islander Knowledge Enhancement Study (Effect of Dextroamphetamine on Arithmetic Performance)
The DREAM Study: The Effect of Different Exercise Assignments on Melatonin
Short-Term Effect of Exercise on Serotonin in Islanders (STEESI)
Lessons Learned
Ann makes the following observations about incorporating The Islands project into her courses:
The project improves teaching by highlighting concepts students are not grasping
Instructor-student relationships become more collegial
Students learn how to apply the concepts and methods they learn in class to a real study
Students experience the entire research process and learn the necessity of teamwork
Students gain experience presenting
Projects are time intensive for students
Students’ lack of knowledge of advanced methods can constrain the types of studies they do
Going to The Islands
Ann introduced a novel teaching tool that can be used in the classroom or at home. A subscription to The Islands is free and available to anyone.
Additional materials can be found in the Google Drive folder: https://tinyurl.com/JSM2019-IslandsProject
To access The Islands, visit Minnesota’s mirror site: https://theislands.umn.edu/
To get instructor access to Minnesota’s mirror site, email your name, institution and department to theislands@umn.edu
On which adventure will your research question take you? We welcome your thoughts in the comments below.