The 2nd edition of the book, Teaching Anatomy – A Practical Guide,
edited by Professor Lap Ki Chan, has just been published by Springer
Springer is a leading global publisher with one of the strongest eBook collections and archives in the scientific, technical and medical fields. However, getting books published by Springer is a stringent process, having to go through stages of proposal, review, and approval. But once published, because of Springer’s wide distribution network, the books will be assured a wide exposure to appropriate readers.
Teaching Anatomy – A Practical Guide is the first book of its kind in the field of anatomy education. Professor Lap Ki Chan is the chief editor, and the co-editor is Professor Wojciech Pawlina, the Professor of Anatomy and Medical Education in the College of Medicine and Science at Mayo Clinic. The second edition of this book has just been released this month. This book received an enthusiastic reception, with over 100,000 downloads since its publication in 2015.
All the 52 chapters were written by internationally well-known anatomists and educators, to offer gross anatomy teachers, novice or experienced, the most up-to-date guidance for anatomy teaching. This book is structured according to the situations that teachers will encounter: teaching large or small groups of students, teaching in the gross anatomy laboratory, writing examination questions, designing anatomy curriculum, using anatomy teaching tools, or building up their scholarship of teaching and learning. In these chapters, the authors talk about such pedagogical innovations as gamification and flipped classroom, and how such technological innovations as 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality, digital anatomy models, portable ultrasound, etc. can be appropriately used. Such a teaching guide is particularly relevant during the current COVID pandemic, when teachers have to modify their teaching practices using the limited resources to suite their unique demands and contexts.
Although the Bachelor of Medicine & Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) program offered by the Faculty of Medicine of MUST is just over one-year old, its teachers have much educational experiences that are important in designing the MBBS curriculum and in helping students to master the contents. The program adopts a competency-based curriculum specifically designed to help students acquire the knowledge, skills, ethics and professionalism to perform their roles, with an emphasis on active learning. Thus, in team-based learning classes, students work in teams to tackle authentic clinical problems. In laboratory classes, students collaborate with, and sometimes even teach one another, in completing tasks that lead to discovery of new knowledge. Even in lectures, students are often engaged in activities that stimulate their thinking, especially in the application of what they are learning in clinical situations. The book, Teaching Anatomy – A Practical Guide, helps to promulgate such teaching practices at MUST to other parts of the world.