Neurological Sciences Team
Creates Virtual Anatomy Course
Each summer, dozens of physical
therapy and Master of Medical Science
graduate students from UVM and
beyond come to the Larner College of
Medicine for a very hands-on Human Gross Anatomy
course. But with in-person instruction prohibited due
to COVID-19, faculty members in the Department of
Neurological Sciences had to either cancel or develop
an alternative plan.
With only six weeks to prepare before the first day of
class on June 22, the team, led by Thayer Professor of
Neurological Sciences and Director of the Anatomical
Gift Program Gary Mawe, Ph.D., got to work to create a
comprehensive, inclusive online version of the class.
First, Mawe took an online course design boot
camp, researched several software programs, and
consulted—through a listserv hosted by the American
Association of Anatomists—with educators at many
other institutions faced with the same dilemma.
Following consultation with other course faculty
members, he settled on a curriculum that includes a
combination of pre-recorded lectures, newly-generated
gross anatomy lab dissection videos, a 3D anatomy app
called Complete Anatomy, and live online discussions
with faculty members.
Faculty members, including Mawe, co-director and
Professor Victor May, Ph.D., and Assistant Professors
Derek Strong, Ph.D., Nicholas D’Alberto, Ph.D., and
Abigail Hielscher, Ph.D., perform the dissections that
students would normally do, and record narrated
videos. Assistant Professor Nathan Jebbett, Ph.D.,
edits the videos to include names and information
about structures of interest, and related schematic
diagrams. Sharon Henry, P.T., Ph.D., A.T.C., professor
of rehabilitation and movement sciences emerita,
provides most of the lectures on upper and lower
extremities. All lecture and laboratory videos are
closed-captioned, with ASL translation, as well.
“It’s a customized course,” says Mawe. “They won’t
see the biological variability, like size of muscles and
variation of arterial branches, that they would normally
see in a large anatomy laboratory,” he says, “but the
faculty are doing their best to get around that by
including specimens from the department’s collection
of high quality dissections that have been saved, with
the consent of the donors.”