Interactive Online Lessons in Pulmonary Physiology: A Graduate Student-Led Approach to Supplementary Learning

Pulmonary physiology is a complex and often challenging aspect of general physiology. Within a six-week cardiopulmonary module of a one-year Masters in Biomedical and Health Sciences program, we utilized Articulate 360’s Rise 360 authoring tool to design eleven brief, interactive lessons. These lessons augmented pulmonary physiology concepts that were first introduced in pulmonary physiology lectures. The lessons were made available after the lectures in Articulate 360’s Reach 360 platform, which functioned as a learning management system. Students who were registered for the class were granted access to the lessons in Reach 360. Lesson use was optional but encouraged. A graduate student instructor created all the lesson content. Each lesson consisted of a five-question multiple-choice pre-video quiz, a brief, less than four-minute, instructional video, and a post-video quiz. The pre- and post-video quizzes were identical, but students only received correct answers and feedback on the post-video quiz. Quiz questions and answer choices were shuffled. Video length ranged from 0:01:25 (h:mm:ss) to 0:04:06 with an average length of 0:02:52. Collectively the video length was 0:31:32. Logins, the amount of time spent, and the percentage of lesson completion were captured in Reach 360. Thirty-one students were enrolled in the lessons; 19 (61.3%) used the lessons. Collectively, there were 26 hours spent learning, and learners completed on average 48% of all eleven lessons (range: 3-100%; mode: 79%). The average time spent learning per user was 1:14:46 (h:mm:ss) with a range of (0:02:48-5:22:33). There were 50 total logins to the lessons over nine days. The average number of user logins was 2.6 (range: 1 - 9). The average score on the pulmonary exams was 0.7 percentage points higher for students who completed any portion of the lessons compared to students who did not use the lessons. Interestingly, there was not a positive correlation between the amount of time spent learning and exam average (R 2 = 0.09; N = 19); however, students who spent less than an hour with the material demonstrated a positive correlation with exam performance (R 2 = 0.64; N = 9) and 3.2 percentage points higher on the pulmonary exams compared to the class as a whole. There is very little published information on the use of the Articulate 360 suite of software to supplement traditional physiology pedagogical methods. We present a case of how this intervention was created by a graduate student instructor and utilized by a Masters cohort of students and the outcomes. Funding for Articulate 360 was received from the Faculty Senate Faculty Development Grant Program. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2025 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.