How Does Visible Body Courseware Compare with Pearson's Mastering A&P?

If you’re a regular reader of the VB Blog, or if you’ve been keeping an eye on recent tech in education trends, you’ll know that lots of instructors are looking for ways to bring their courses' textbook(s) to life with online resources. Many textbooks even come with their own set of digital study tools that can be accessed with a code. 

One popular online textbook subscription resource is Pearson’s Mastering A&P, so today we’ll be comparing that with our own web-based anatomy education platform, Visible Body Courseware. We hope to give you some food for thought about which tool might be right for your classroom or lab based on textbook correlation, cost to students, digital cadavers, quiz and study aid content, and video content. 

A textbook with tech vs. tech with a textbook

At the most macro level, the key difference between Courseware and Mastering A&P is that Mastering is intended to be used to supplement a textbook, whereas Courseware can be used on its own or paired up with your favorite textbook.

Let’s take a look at how each product matches up with textbook use. 

Mastering A&P is available for around 23 A&P textbooks and lab manuals (n.b. this number applies only to the US and Canada). These titles include popular, widely-used textbooks such as Marieb & Hoehn and Martini et al. The content in the Mastering bundle for each title is correlated closely with the way the textbook is structured, so in that sense Mastering A&P is a true online companion for these books. 

Every element of Visible Body Courseware is highly customizable, and our textbook correlation capabilities are especially flexible. Our education team has created a large selection of premade courses tailored to a similar list of popular textbooks, with the addition of courses in dental anatomy, anatomy for speech and hearing science, kinesiology, and exercise physiology. If you’re looking to use Open Educational Resources (OERs) such as Open Stax, we have courses on our list to suit your needs as well.   

Courseware can even be used in place of a traditional textbook! For more information on making the switch from a traditional textbook to digital anatomy education resources, check out this webcast by Dr. Cindy Harley of Metropolitan State University.

You don't have to give up textbook-style content with Courseware. Courseware comes with access to Visible Body Suite on mobile and desktop. From VB Suite’s main menu, simply select Anatomy & Physiology, and you will be brought to a premade A&P course designed to align with a typical A&P syllabus. Like a virtual textbook made up of interactive chapters, the Anatomy & Physiology content combines text with interactive models, animations, illustrations, and histology slides in bite-sized learning modules. Its 50 chapters take you through all major body systems!

The main point here is that when it comes to textbook correlation, Mastering A&P is highly specific, which is good for courses that adhere closely to a particular, commonly-used textbook, but Visible Body Courseware provides a wide range of textbook correlation options. Essentially, Courseware can be adapted to fit any A&P textbook or A&P course curriculum. 

Quizzes, activities, and study aids

One of the strongest points in Mastering A&P’s favor as a product is that it has lots of quizzes and activities for students to use as study aids and/or homework assignments. With Mastering A&P, students have access to flashcards, structure identification quizzes, multiple-choice questions, and fill-in-the-blank labeling quizzes. These are features that students really tend to like.

The good news is that Courseware is also full of quizzes, activities, and flashcards! 

Visible Body Courseware offers an extensive library of premade courses, immersive assignments, Flashcards, Tours, and more to save instructors time and energy. All of that content is easily edited and customized for your class's specific needs. With Courseware, you get the best of both worlds: great premade content plus the ability to edit it as you see fit. 

Let's take a quick tour of these features. 

Immersive assignments

In an immersive assignment, instructions guide students through 3D models, animations, simulations, and more as they progress through a series of activities and quizzes. Immersive assignments create an “on the rails,” distraction-free online environment where students can move seamlessly through activities. 

An immersive assignment in Courseware. 

Mastering A&P has a similar feature, Interactive Physiology. In Interactive Physiology, students view animations, click on links to other content, and complete drag-and-drop activities that test their physiology knowledge. With Mastering A&P's PhysioEx, students can also complete physiology simulations.

When it comes to anatomy, immersive assignments in Courseware offer more flexibility and more options for creating interactive assignments. 

For one, the Visible Body team has designed premade immersive assignments that cover all body systems and the basics of biology. These assignments are completely editable, and you can also build your own immersive assignments through a simple, drag-and-drop assignment builder. When creating an immersive assignment, you can choose from a vast library of models, animations, 3D lessons, and simulations. 

Dissection quizzes

Students who like the structure identification quizzes will love the interactive dissection quizzes in Courseware. Dissection quizzes go beyond traditional structure identification by asking students to select structures on a fully interactive 3D model instead of just adding a name to an already-labeled structure.  

With our quiz and question banks, you can write your own multiple-choice, short-answer, and dissection questions or choose from our premade ones to make quizzes that are just right for checking your students’ knowledge. 

Annotation tools

The 3D Draw and Notepad features in VB Suite allow students to add arrows, circles, text notes, and much more to 3D views. Users can also add tags to structures, and they can even add blank tags to test themselves with later. 

When users have finished adding annotations, they can save those notes and return to them for later studying!

Flashcards

Flashcards are something that Mastering A&P and Courseware have in common! In Mastering A&P, users can choose a topic through PAL and flashcards are generated based on that topic. On one side is the image of the structure and on the other is the definition. You can zoom in and out to view the structure. 

The Flashcards available through Courseware offer more flexibility and give students the opportunity to study in 3D. Users can choose from our library of premade Flashcard Decks or make their own! 

Flashcards are a great way to study on the go using the VB Suite mobile app!

Making Flashcards is a great way for students to engage in high order thinking as they assess their own knowledge and create their own Flashcard prompts. Users can use all of VB Suite's annotation features to customize their Flashcards! 

While studying with Flashcards, users can click "View in 3D" in the upper corner to be instantly brought to the 3D model that the Flashcard is based on. After exploring the model, one click brings you back to the Flashcard Deck. 

When it comes to quizzing and study aids, Mastering A&P definitely has a solid selection of reliable resources. Courseware, however, lets instructors and students think outside the box and customize their teaching, learning, and studying experiences with innovative, interactive tools.

Digital cadavers

Students can’t be in the lab all the time, so a reference tool they can use outside of class is a must. Both Mastering A&P and Courseware offer their own reference tools—Mastering has Practice Anatomy Lab (PAL) and Courseware has VB Suite. 

PAL contains cadaver photos of various body systems and structures, photos of plastic anatomy models of different organs, and 3D anatomy models. It also contains a comprehensive collection of histology slides for various organs and body tissues. One of PAL’s coolest features is that it contains animal models that are frequently used in A&P lab dissections, such as a cat, fetal pig, sheep organs, and cow eye. On the other hand, Courseware contains dissectible frog, pig, sea star, and earthworm models.

In both PAL and VB Suite, students can manipulate 3D models and view 2D content, but what makes VB Suite stand out?

The first thing you might notice is that the models in VB Suite are realistically textured. Visible Body's in-house team of biomedical visualization experts are dedicated to accuracy, working hard to ensure that our 3D models look like the real deal and not like plastic renderings. 

The gross anatomy lab (GAL) in VB Suite.

VB Suite's 3D models of the male and female body allow students to manipulate, dissect, annotate, and view in AR. VB Suite also contains moving muscle animation models, microanatomy models, cross-section models with corresponding CT/MRI scans and cadaver slices, and interactive dissection quizzes (more on those later).

When students select a structure in VB Suite, they can see an info box which contains a definition, pronunciation, related structures, and landmarks or structure details such as origins/insertions, blood supply, and innervation.

Muscle details in VB Suite. 

All in all, VB Suite provides a more interactive digital dissection experience than PAL. Also, although PAL is good for studying on a desktop, VB Suite is available as both a web and a mobile app with Courseware. This means that students have access to models of the human body in full 3D anytime, anywhere.

Video content

One of the advantages of using technology alongside a textbook is that an online resource allows instructors to incorporate video content. These videos can take a textbook’s stationary animations and bring the concepts they illustrate to life for students.

Given that Mastering A&P is intended to be a digital companion for textbooks, it probably isn’t surprising that it has a sizeable amount of video content. The videos that accompany textbook chapters in Mastering A&P are around five minutes long and contain a lecture-style narration accompanied by a series of illustrations and/or animations. They enhance the traditional textbook experience by providing anatomical overviews and illustrate key physiological concepts. However, the visuals in these videos are fairly dated—the videos play much like collections of lecture slides. 

Video content is an area where VB Suite shines. The videos in these apps are truly short and sweet—they’re usually around a minute long. Produced by biomedical visualization experts, they present visually-engaging 3D animations of everything from normal physiological processes to common pathologies. In that sense, they truly bring A&P content to life instead of moving through a series of illustrations. What’s more, the bite-sized nature of these videos is great for a quick introduction or for brushing up on important concepts before an exam. 

Prof. Blythe Nilson explains how short 3D animations help students master physiology concepts.

What do students think?

When we sent a survey to students who had just completed a trial of Courseware, their preference for Courseware over Pearson’s Mastering (which they had been using before) was clear. Overall, students rated Courseware as easier to use, more engaging, and more easily accessible for on-the-go studying. They also reported that Courseware motivated them to study more, and had higher-quality animations and artwork. 

Here’s the data:

So what are the take-home points? 

Mastering A&P is a comprehensive digital companion for many of the most popular A&P textbooks. Although its content is informative, thorough, and closely correlated with the textbook, Mastering does not allow for a ton of customization. Its visuals and quizzing tools also lag behind the cutting edge.

We at VB maintain that course customization doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. If you want a visually vibrant, engaging course that’s tailored to a textbook AND customized to your instructional style and your students’ learning style, it’s quick and easy to create one in Courseware (and we have a fantastic support team here to help you if you need it)!

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