Associate Teaching Professor BME/ Assistant Dean WSE Johns Hopkins University, United States
Introduction: Today, engineers face complex societal difficulties associated with the development and use of new technologies. Biomedical engineering programs and others, reacting to the "social turn" in engineering education (Authors, 2021), have incorporated the design process to address real open-ended and ill-defined engineering challenges (Litzinger et al., 2011). Particularly, in Biomedical Engineering, there are curricular courses that look to resolve issues prompted by medical professionals (Authors, 2022; Manbachi et al., 2020; Logson et al., 2017). The design process instructed often involves teaching content on final users, user workflow, and need requirements related to the validation process from a regulatory FDA perspective. However, dealing with the socio-technical systems in the design of new technologies might require deeper knowledge and methods for better understanding behavior, and working with human-derived information that can be imperfect. AnthroDesign for Healthcare is a first-year seminar that looks to better prepare biomedical engineering and pre-med students under the epistemic framework of cultural anthropology and practical tools from design. Through a semester-long project, the students only work on the problem space related to a healthcare challenge and they document their journey in an ePortfolio. The research methods used look to shy away from a patient-deficit perspective, to understand bias and positionality, and to embrace the rigor in applied qualitative research. The following research is a qualitative case study where we use secondary data to describe the course, and we engage in an initial exploration through interviews to understand how students perceive the use of ePortfolios.
Materials and
Methods: Once the IRB gave their approval, we used purposeful sampling to connect with students who took the course in Fall 2023. Participants are mostly premeds coming from majors like neurosciences, chemical and biomolecular engineering, and biomedical engineering at an R1 institution. However, the course also had a small portion of the students who were computer sciences majors but who were also interested in working in the medical area. The students were all over 18 years old and took the first-year seminar Anthro Design for Healthcare as a pass/fail elective. The first-year seminar is a new requirement from a major curricular change this institution is undergoing. Students self-select themselves into the course. In addition, the participants had been all initiated on a pilot program for the use of ePortfolios with the platform Digication. Before arriving on campus, the students were taught remotely how to create a Digication profile and an About Me page. In line with several educational research, the design of this qualitative study is to observe how processes occur naturally rather than to conduct any experimental activity. For this descriptive qualitative case study (Yin, 2017) we used individual open-ended interviews (Schensul and LeCompte, 1999; Weiss, 2004) to understand how the students experience the use of the ePortfolio in the AnthroDesign Course. All interviews were transcribed using Parrot.AI and are being coded using Grounded Theory (Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). At this moment, this is a work in progress.
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: Based on a 2021 study where the authors found relevant epistemic change in engineering students after participating in an AnthroDesign course, we knew that the content of this course does make the students think about the rigor of qualitative research, the importance of individuals beyond the idea of the user, and their identity as a social engineer. In this study, we examined the content of the course tailored to the Healthcare environment, the debates and discussions brought into the context of the class, the visual artifacts produced, and how the students document their qualitative research and findings using the digital platform Digication. We know that ePortfolios enable folio thinking (Lorenzo and Ittelson, 2005) and can afford the documentation and reflection of the student’s life project (Authors, 2023). Preliminary findings show that the first-year students had no relevant issues when adopting the platform. The ePortfolio documentation afforded discussion and negotiation when teams were deciding what to post or not, so there is a moment of not only convergence, but also depicts the challenges of data dissemination, informed consent, and authorship. It seems that the students were driven by the underlying framework of a class that discusses topics related to deficit perspectives, equitable futures, and the positionality of the researcher. Storytelling was constantly reported by the interviewees as the ePortfolio, in their words: “forced me to really think about what I did and why … it is completely personalized as opposed to just putting it into like a description box”(interviewee). This connection between doing applied qualitative research through an anthropological lens, documenting it through an ePortfolio, and reflecting on it due to the issue of dissemination is something that we need to further explore. This is a work in progress and we expect to have more information once the conference takes place.
Acknowledgements (Optional): To all the students who participated in this research project.
