Visualising Evolutionary Medicine

This project aimed to develop interactive visualisations on the topic of evolutionary medicine. These visualisations were intended to bring to life biological mechanisms and evolutionary concepts in medical contexts, and to be integrated alongside other teaching activities, first in a master course and then in a bachelor course.

Goal 1. Produce four interactive visualisations on the topic of evolutionary medicine, incorporating student input from previous and current cohorts. Each visualisation will correspond to one of four key subtopics which are covered in sequence in weeks 2-9 of the course (Antibiotic resistance; Host range; Virulence; Coevolution and host factors).

Goal 2. Integrate four interactive visualisations into the master course Evolutionary Medicine for Infectious Diseases; collect student feedback and improve visualisations for the following year.

Goal 3. Adapt the four interactive visualisations for the bachelor course Umweltsysteme I and integrate them in that course; collect student feedback and improve visualisations for the following year.

Goal 4. Make visualisations and methodology for developing them available to other teachers at ETH Zürich; engage in two-way exchange with other teachers about how to best integrate such visuals in teaching on such topics at ETH.

Goal 5. Maximise accessibility. We aim to make the project’s output readable and usable for all learners, by using best practices in digital accessibility and by exploiting the visual/interactive elements of the project.

– Students
This project will enable students to connect different kinds of information from various domains, which is necessary for tackling major health and medical challenges. The project will achieve this by introducing a missing element, interactive visuals. Because each visualisation exercise is followed up with a break-out group discussion, where students apply their learning to new problems, they will be empowered to take these new tools with them beyond the end of the course. The project will also increase accessibility of these courses, particularly relevant for students with motory, sensory or psychological impediments or specific learning requirements.

– Faculty
The project will add a new layer to student-led discussions in class, equipping teaching staff with new tools to explain fundamental concepts to the entire student cohort. It will do this by bridging gaps between different disciplines, for example by demystifying key terminology from different fields and connecting different spatial scales. The output will have high artistic and design quality, as well as scientific and didactic value. Achieving this requires cross-disciplinary collaboration between science faculty and experts in design, didactics and educational technology.

– The entire degree programme
The two courses are attended by students from multiple degree programmes. A key benefit will be to facilite greater communication and exchange of ideas across the relevant fields and study programmes. A second benefit to all degree programmes is the opportunity for students to explore their own interests and deepen their understanding in a self-directed way, for example by using pop-up boxes, links to further material, and other interactive elements.

Evolutionary medicine means applying evolutionary thinking to problems in health and disease. A key didactic challenge in this field, as in others, is that students need to connect very different types of information. Here, that means connecting theoretical evolutionary biology with molecular and mechanistic aspects from the medical side. This also involves thinking about processes that work across different levels of organisation (from inside bacterial cells to populations of humans). We therefore wanted to use visual aids to enable students to make the mental connection between different types of information and spatial scales, for example combining theoretical evolutionary concepts with mechanistic biological details.  In turn, we aimed to foster a deeper understanding of the subject matter, aligning with the learning objectives of the relevant courses.

We produced an interactive website including visualisations on two of the major themes from the course Evolutionary Medicine for Infectious Diseases. For each theme, the visualisations have several layers that can be interactively explored by the students. A related highlight was when we devoted classtime to exploring and discussing visualisations in this context, including possible new ways of applying this kind of thinking and methodology to explore other topics and questions.

From the in-class discussion we had about this, there were two main take-aways. First, the visualisations were viewed as complementary to other parts of the course, presenting in new ways information and concepts that had already been discussed or investigated in other formats, thereby helping to consolidate key ideas and concepts and to make connections between them. Second, it had a positive impact to provide these learning materials in a visually appealing and different format to other study materials in the course. Students came up with good ideas for other topics where such a visual approach could be taken and some even made their own sketches during this discussion.

The coordination effort required to create an interactive website was greater than anticipated, for example requiring us to organize several components such as the visuals themselves, website programming/IT, accessibility, scientific content and didactics. A second lesson was that it worked well to provide access to the materials early on and without overspecifying when and for what the students should use them, to encourage students to explore the content on their own terms and follow their own curiosity. This was slightly different to how it had been initially planned, but especially after the mid-project discussion with UTL we decided to take this approach and it worked well. A third lesson was that we found it worked better to focus on two comprehensive visuals, each with several layers and examples relevant for the core of the course, rather than making four separate visuals as initially planned; this was also more realistic in terms of the practicalities of making the content and website.

Using high-quality visuals to bring the content to life is something students seem to really appreciate. It’s not clear that this always needs to be done in a high-tech way, such as an interactive website as we did here, which is more work to prepare than some simpler formats such as images that are accessed online and then discussed, or presented in class as part of a structured discussion. The possibility for students to make their own sketches is also something that we had not allocated a lot of time to, but if this is offered in-class in a relaxed way, it could bring benefits in terms of engagement with the content and peer exchange within the class.

Interactive website