The Mechanism of Prozac: A Study in High-Tech Pedagogy
Of my project’s many goals the most valuable to me was graduating from my own subjectivity as a creator of educational material. All of my past work, for example, has primarily resulted from my own intuition as to what an effective teaching tool is. And although the development of my past projects was aided by others’ input, this input was relatively minor. What makes my Prozac project progressive is the pedagogical study incorporated from the project’s conception. This incorporation alloted a portion of the project to collecting, analyzing, and acting upon student feedback. By considering students’ thoughts of my Prozac animation, I was able to improve the efficacy of this particular animation, as well as derive some general maxims that can guide the production of future animations.
On Wednesday, February 4, 2009, I presented a completed rough draft of my Prozac animation to Dr. Bongsup Cho’s BPS322 “The Central Nervous System’s Core” class. After the viewing, I sent emails to all of the class’s students asking for their feedback. The email read as follows:
For my Senior Honors Project I am researching the pedagogy of advanced technology. I have designed a 3D animation of Prozac’s Mechanism that is to be used in classrooms and on youtube. This animation will be an updated version of URI Animation’s 2005 animation, which has received over 30,000 youtube hits in the last two years.
So far I have designed what I think is an effective teaching device, and by getting your feedback on this device, I can see just how effective it is. I am ultimately aiming to produce the most educational video possible, so your feedback as a student is crucial.
Please answer each of the following questions with a short paragraph.
1. How useful was this video in helping you to understand how Prozac works?
2. What were your technical impressions of the video? (Graphics, Coloring, Speed, Timing, Voiceover, Text Labels, etc.)
3. Do you have any additional comments/suggestions?
Of the class’s nearly 100 students, I received feedback from 25 students. In response to question one, regarding the animation’s efficacy as a visual supplement to auditory/textual lessons, 25 out of 25 students agreed that the visual supplementation increased their understanding or Prozac’s mechanism. Their positive responses are as follows:1
1. The video was great at relaying the mechanism of action of prozac. It was a great visual tool to grasp the entire concept.
[1. Student feedback for this section has been edited to only include positive commends. Students’ negative comments are addressed in following section. Students names and email addresses have been disassociated from their comments to maintain anonymity.]
2. I thought the video did a good job illustrating prozac’s mechanism of action. Your explanation is very in-depth and complete.
3. I enjoyed the animations. It can be difficult to picture the molecular workings on your own, especially if you’re not visually oriented and creative to imagine it yourself. It was well animated the graphics flowed well and timing and speed were in sync.
4. Very helpful in understanding the mechanism. Better than a diagram or text description. Great presentation.
6. Well done. Good job. It was a fine job.
7. Very useful. Not only was it simple to understand for someone who does not have an intense background studying pharmacy, it was also easy to understand for someone who has a much more in-depth knowledge of how Prozac works. Basically, both amateurs and professionals could watch that video and learn something from it. The mechanism of action for Prozac is very clearly demonstrated with the animation and I think it will be a useful tool in helping students further understand Prozac’s mechanism and also to give a very concise visual when they’re studying. Very good job! I should expect your Honor’s Project adjudicators will be very impressed!
8. The video was very useful in helping me understand and visualize what is happening at the synapse. This video is a tremendous learning tool. Graphics were very well done, voiceover and timing were good, colors used throughout the video keep the viewer attentive. I think the video is awesome. You took a rather complex set of chemical reactions and put it into an easy to understand, accurate and usful video.
9. This video was very helpful. We had seen another animation in the beginning of class that was rather confusing. This video was extremely helpful in clarifying any uncertainty. It was clearly explained, used simple animation, and conveyed a confusing concept in a simple manner. The technical impressions were good as well. Everything was clear and the voiceover went perfectly with the animations. The speed was great…not too slow, not too fast. This video was very helpful. I am someone who has difficulty understanding mechanisms and tools like this would be very useful in medicinal chemistry classes. Thanks!
10. The video was somewhat useful, although I am not a person who requires visuals to understand concepts. It is not a tool that I would personally utilize but I can see it being helpful for others, it was very clear. The video seemed to flow well technically.
11. Very helpful. Great graphics, liked the colors, speed and timing was good and easy to follow, voiceover and text labels were very clear.
12. I think the presentation was very helpful in clarifying how prozac works. I am a very visual learner and this video allowed me to understand prozac perfectly. The graphics and labeling were great too. Overall this video is a very useful teaching tool. Thanks for coming into our class.
13. It was great and very explanatory. It was easy to follow and understand. It doesn’t need any improvement and you should be proud of your hard work!
14. The video was very useful in understanding how the mechanism of Prozac helps to keep serotonin levels higher in the synapse and consequently impose it’s drug effect on the body. The video was vivid with good color use and timing. I would like to thank you for your time and effort. Best of luck with your Senior Honors Project.
15. The video was very comprehensive and straightforward. I think that it was helpful and simple enough so that the general public could also understand the pharmacology. Overall, technically, the video was impressive. The graphics seemed very up-to-date. It was user friendly, and eye-catching enough to maintain the viewers attention throughout the duration of the video. I think that the video was overall very well done. It will certainly be helpful to people interested in learning about the mechanism of action of prozac.
16. The video was very informative and clear in displaying the mechanism of action of Prozac (Fluoxetine). The video was fantastic in every way, pacing, light, graphics, etc. The content of the voiceover was superb. The video was fantastic and I would be curious to learn the results of your project, because it is an extremely relevant topic in education. Good work!
17. It was extremely useful. All of the mechanisms where clearly shown/depicted and made it easy to understand how it worked. [Graphics, Coloring, Speed, Timing, Voiceover, Text Labels, etc.] were all excellent! The voice over was perfectly timed and at a great pace. It really was informative, all of the colors, speed and text were excellent! Thanks for taking the time to put something like this together!
18. The animation was very useful as a way to visualize how Prozac works. It definitely shows how the drug interacts with the receptor to produce the desired effect. By the end of the animation, I was able to recall certain specifics that are important. Overall, it is a very useful teaching tool. I know personally that I am a visual learner so for others like me, this is a perfect way to learn. Thanks for showing it to us!
19. I think it is an excellent teaching tool. The technical aspects were great and it was nice to finally hear a voice-over explaining the steps. I think it was a great video. Best of luck with your project!
20. This video was very well put together and interesting enough to hold attention. It was colorful which is always helpful. The graphics were great, it flowed smoothly and made it easy to see what was happening. The timing was smooth, Coloring was helpful. It was a good length, not too long or short. Thank you for showing us your presentation, good luck with your project!
21. Great job! It was a very helpful video. Coloring was good.
22. I thought the animation was quite excellent and easy to understand. You provided adequate information in that small amount of time. Great job!
23. I thought this video was very helpful in understanding how Prozac works. I feel that actually seeing the mechanism in action is a much more effective learning tool than simply reading a few words on a page of paper. Overall, the video was solid. Great animations that accurately conveyed the mechanism of action. Overall, great video. Good luck with your project.
24. Thank you for coming to our class – your video is great. Very useful- Dr. Cho had just finished explaining it, and your video repeated exactly what he said so the reinforcement was good. Actually seeing what’s going on is so much more helpful than just listening to a description. Slow enough to understand it, and explained clearly. I liked how you wrote out what you were saying at the side or top of the screen (I’m way more visual than auditory lol- so it was good you have both ways available.) The voiceover was good. Can you make a video about the mechanism of action of every drug? Jk, thanks again though.
25. Anytime that people use visuals to teach, it is helpful. The technology you showed makes it now possible to visualize and identify with what is occurring on the molecular level and puts it in perspective for students, patients, or anyone wanting to learn. Very helpful video overall. Thank you!
In response to question two, regarding the animation’s technical aspects (Graphics, Coloring, Speed, Timing, Voiceover, Text Labels, etc.) there were three major criticisms: the dull voice over, the ambiguous handling of proteins, and the inconsistent pace. 11 out of 25 students complained that the voice over was either hard to hear, difficult to align with the visual, or non-entertaining. 5 out of 25 students complained that the labeling/coloring/and auditory address of essential Proteins was ambiguous. And 5 out of 25 students complained that the animation’s cadence was inconsistent.
To improve these issues, I expanded the voice over, made the labels more prominent, and conformed the animation to one steady cadence. In revisiting my animation after reading students’ feedback, I was able to identify how the voice over’s pauses and animation’s poor transitions detracted from its educational potential. To eliminate the voice over’s pauses, I expanded the script to provide further context, while shortening the duration of the animation’s less critical scenes. And to ease the animation’s transitions between scenes, I added title screens to introduce the following scenes. With this title screens, viewers can easily distinguish the normal mechanism from the altered mechanism, etc. After implementing these three fixes, the problem of cadence was solved as well. With the changes I made, I was able to reduce the animation’s run time by 30 seconds while still fitting in more detail.
A general maxim that I gleaned from the students’ feedback as a whole is that an animation’s focus at any given moment should be kept as singular and in context as possible. Personally, I can watch animations as a single entity, gathering and rearranging all of its components as necessary to arrive at a full understanding. And because this method of derivation works for me, I had assumed that viewers of my animations would be comfortable working in a similar way. But after considering the student feedback, I have learned that this was an unfounded assumption that expects too much effort from viewers. By making simple structural changes to my animation I was able to minimize the amount of effort viewers had to expend in understanding Prozac’s mechanism.
In my animation’s first scene, for example, I had provided viewers with text on the left, and an image of prozac on the right, while a voice over accompanied. The text on screen was different from the voice over, and neither was necessarily relevant to the image of prozac. I thought that this presentation was sufficient because at the end of the scene, I had provided viewers with a lot of information. What I have since learned, is that onscreen text and visuals should not compete for students’ attention, rather, they should always correspond with each other and with the voice over script. Students cannot be expended to pay attention to multiple things at once.
During the process of presenting and gathering student feedback, I was thoroughly surprised to receive such interested and positive responses from students. 19 out of 25 students shared “off topic” words of encouragement. It was clear from their unsolicited and detailed support that their interest in the teaching material went beyond the traditional curriculum. So from these results I concluded that student interest in classroom material is sparked when a peer contributes to the teaching content.
Defining and catering to target audiences is curious, as my animation has two polarized audiences. On the one hand, my animation is intended to educate student in URI’s pharmacy classrooms, and on the other hand, they are intended to educate any lay person around the world. With the advent of YouTube, and Dr. Cho’s competitive adoption of the technology, URI’s College of Pharmacy is able to share their teaching aids with the global community. As of April 2009, URI Animation’s 15 videos had received over 300,000 hits. The average URI Animation animation receives over 20,000 hits annually with much as 90% of those hits resulting from YouTube’s search function, outside of University affiliation. So while the importance of making a video effective for pharmacy students is immediately clear, making a video that hundreds of thousands of curious viewers can learn from is now an equally important concern.
To successfully appeal to both of these audiences I have made the content of my Prozac animation scalable. That is to say, the core message of the animation is not dependent on the details of the animation. By keeping these two aspects separate, a pharmacist can appreciate the animation’s apt vocabulary and visual nuance, while a lay viewer can disregard pharmacological terms and still glean the general idea.
After Thoughts
There is a strong consensus in the field of pedagogy that people have the potential to learn through multiple senses, and that the use of curriculum that capitalizes in unison on multiple senses will yield higher rates of understanding. In their article, “The Relative Effectiveness of Audio, Video, and Static Visual Computer-Mediated Presentations,” A. Curtis LeeSing and Carol A. Miles posit that people learn 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and 50% of what they watch. LeeSing and Miles continue to say that the degree to which people master a concept may not change, rather the time it takes them to master the concept is the variable(LeeSing 212). If time is supposed as the variable while the degree of mastery is a given, it is reasonable to conclude that the best teaching tool is one that maintains a singular focus while appealing to the greatest number of senses.
In addition to capitalizing on multiple senses, animations are useful because they provide students with multiple viewings and on demand pace control that can best suit their individual learning styles (Velleman 217). In other words, different students may need to view an animation a different number of times before understanding it. URI Animation’s adoption of YouTube hosting provides students with this personalized control. Beyond variable viewings, each student approaches viewing from a different perspective, and the fluid nature of 3D animations ensures that these different perspectives are catered to. In my Prozac animation, for example, I have used multiple dynamic cameras to provide wide coverage of a single focal point. Approaching a concept from many different angles is critical to a student’s learning because any one angle could be the visual key to that student’s understanding (Velleman 218).
What I realized in the process of making my Prozac animation is that as helpful to learning as watching an animation is, making an animation is an order of magnitude more helpful. Learning, says Velleman, is “inherently interactive,” and therefore curriculums should “encourage students to be active participants in learning” (219). Of course, my Prozac animation required years of training and multiple 30 hour work sessions, I.E. an effort to education ratio impractical when made categorical. It is my thought, however, that if employed by the highest level students with regard to the highest level subject matter, there is a profound potential for learning.
Works Cited
• Multimedia for Teaching Statistics: Promises and Pitfualls, Paul F. Velleman and David S. Moore. August 1996 Vol. 50, No. 3. American Statistical Association – 217.
• The Relative Effectiveness of Audio, Video, and Static Visual Computer-Mediated Presentations, A. Curtis LeeSing and Carol A. Miles. Spring 1999 Vol. 24, NO. 2. Canadian Society for the study of education – 212.
• Designed New Media Education Research: The Materiality of Data, Representation, and Dissemination, Rick Voithofer. December 2005 Vol. 34, No. 9. American Education Research Association – 3.
• An Almost Complete Movie, George Diallinas
December 12, 2008 Vol. 322 Science – 1644.
• A Competitive Inhibitor Traps LeuT in an Open-to-Out Conformation, Satinder K. Singh, Chayne L. Piscitelli, Atsuko Yamashita, Eric Gousaux. December 12, 2008 Vol. 322 Science – 1655.