Presented By: Brianne Lewis, Central Michigan College of Medicine
Co-Authors: Stefanie Attardi, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Kara Sawarynski, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine

Purpose
In the classroom, learners are faced with intrinsic and extrinsic psychological and temporal barriers that may preclude participation and learning. In response, we present an asynchronous instructional design modality, ACQUIRE (ACcessible QUality Interactions and REsponsiveness), which aims to reduce learning barriers while retaining active learning strategies and fostering learner-teacher communication. This study describes and quantifies benefits of the design and aspects for improvement.

Methods
The ACQUIRE modality is an asynchronous online session, built using modular software, that allows flexible navigation through short instructional videos, formative assessment questions, and reflection questions, which the teacher responds to directly. The modality was used for 33 basic medical science sessions, taken by three cohorts of 125 medical students. Student narrative feedback comments (n=3075) were extracted from faculty evaluation data. Narrative data were first categorized as positive or constructive feedback. The data were coded openly and descriptively in Google Sheets and grouped into categories.

Results
Data are presented as mean±SD. A majority of comments were positive(76.6%±2.12%) with 43.5%±8.7% of these focused on the ACQUIRE modality. Within these responses, students most benefited from formative practice questions (18.6%±2.3%), the modular format (17.3%±2.7%), engagement with material (11.1%±0.9%), ease of asking questions (9.2%±2.4%), overall organization (8.0±2.8%), and fast responsiveness from the teacher (7%±2.0). Fewer comments were constructive (15.0±2.1%), with (51.5%±30.9%) of these focused on the ACQUIRE modality. More formative questions (30.5%±21.8%) and navigation challenges(9.3%±12.2%) were described for improvement.

Conclusion
This study shows that students feel positive towards the ACQUIRE modality and the benefits rely on teacher behavior/responsiveness and design. These strategies are not LMS-dependent and can be transferred to other platforms.