Courseware in the CTE Classroom: An Interview with Marina Orobinskaia

Posted on 1/12/24 by Sarah Boudreau

I recently chatted with Marina Orobinskaia, director of the nursing assistant program at Northshore School District’s Medical Professions Academy. 

Visible Body’s Education Team has designed premade Courseware courses to fit a variety of courses and textbooks. These fully-customizable courses save instructors like Marina time and energy that can be better spent teaching. Marina’s students use the premade anatomy content in Visible Body Courseware as a series of homework and self-study assignments.

Below is our conversation about teaching, Courseware, and A&P! 

How long have you been teaching? 

I've been teaching for sixteen years. I teach at Woodinville High School. It's in a well-off district [...] We have high-capacity kids. 

What do you teach?

My program specifically is a nursing assistant program, which prepares for an entry-level job in the field, and it's a prerequisite for the nursing program. It's a certifying program, so they get a nursing assistant certificate, and they can start the job right after graduation. 

The program is for juniors and seniors—with my cohort of kids, I am pretty much teaching prenursing and premed. The high-capacity kids who go in this direction are very responsible, very highly motivated. I say that I have the best kids! 

beating-heart-ecg-gif

The interactive beating heart model in Visible Body Suite, part of Courseware. 

How long have you used Visible Body Courseware?

I think I've used it for five years now. It seems like it's always been here! 

Before Visible Body, we just used textbooks and a model skeleton. I saw a stand by Visible Body at a national conference, and that’s how I got interested in it—the 3D format and rotation, and I thought the augmented reality was such a cool thing, though we don’t really use it now. 

Our district bought it for me, and now, they’re offering it in anatomy and physiology and for sports medicine—in our district, I think there are five programs using Visible Body, if not more. 

How do you use Visible Body in your classroom? 

Given the fact that we study so much in nursing—caregiving, clinics, and studying medical terminology on the college level—Visible Body is pretty much a self-study course for us. 

Students study at home and take quizzes as homework. They just go through and learn, there's nothing else to it. At the end, I have their grades listed, and I put them into the gradebook. 

integumentary-system

A dissection quiz in Courseware. 

I remember my days in medical school—you took the book home, and you studied. That's it. You were lucky if you got to go to the morgue and see the corpses for dissection. Now, you can rotate, and press a button and it will pronounce everything for you and will explain everything. 

How has using Courseware changed how you teach?

I know that some teachers teach anatomy & physiology as a primary subject, and that's different—I'm grateful to Visible Body because it took the load of anatomy off my shoulders. 

They study anatomy themselves, the gradebook is there, and I can spend time on nursing, caregiving, and on skills. It's an intuitive course, and I don't have a headache about any basics of anatomy. 

I cannot teach any urinary system problems and disease without them understanding the basics of anatomy—now, I don't teach it, I have them learn it themselves so we can spend more time on case studies, on how to help patients better, and so on. So, thanks, Visible Body! 

 

Wrap-up

We’d like to thank Marina for chatting about Courseware with us! 

If you're an educator who wants to take VB Suite for a test drive, you can request an institutional trial, and our education team will get you set up. 

You can also read more on the Visible Body Blog:

 

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