In recent years, every college professor at universities big and small has been faced with the fundamental question of how to adapt course materials into a digital platform. Each one of us must find the platform that fits, adapts, and is amicable to our needs as well as the needs of our department’s curriculum and students. My exercise testing, prescription, and assessment class uses ACSM’s Exercise Testing and Prescription, 2e on the Lippincott Connect digital courseware platform. The course is taught three days a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (MWF) for 50 minutes per class session. I integrate both formative and summative assessment techniques with the goal of maximizing student learning.  The table below helps describe how I integrate my weekly materials. The following five tips are what I have learned when teaching ACSM’s material and how Lippincott Connect assists both myself and my students.

Table 1: Weekly Course Instructional Plan

Tip #1: Be Able to Walk into your Classroom and Talk to your Students

On Mondays I lecture using resources and videos provided within Lippincott Connect. I build my lecture by developing notes using the PowerPoint slides, the eBook chapter, and the Chapter Proficiency Quizzes. Together, the videos, assessment, and resources provide the foundation for my lectures and our class discussions, allowing me to introduce the weekly topic and highlight the major points of the material.

My students want more than just the professor reading the slides to them during the lecture² and Lippincott Connect helps me deliver. I need to make my lectures practical for those students who learn by visual means as well as conceptual ideas which can lead to richer, fuller discussions about the materials. Using an ACSM video at the beginning or middle of the lecture can emphasize a point or demonstrate a technique. The ACSM videos and worksheets in Lippincott Connect offer several potential discussion opportunities which I craft into our discussions. This allows me to employ a formative form of assessment for the students¹.

Tip #2 Lab Day- Practical Application. This is Where the Rubber Meets the Road!

On Wednesday, Lab provides a practical application of the materials and enables students to learn the necessary skills they will need in real life clinical settings. This is not just a formative form of assessment, but also a summative evaluation when I can grade the students in their performance of techniques.

The application of laboratory experiments provides the student and the professor a practical method of integrating cognitive information (ACSM protocols) with the practical skills the students will be using in clinical settings. This is where Lippincott Connect excels in providing detailed charts defining ACSM standards for testing. These charts can be used in the lab to help students understand, when they perform their lab tests in real time, if their performance numbers are within a predetermined standardized range. Best of all, it allows me to provide immediate feedback to the students².

Tip #3 Provide Closure on the Week - “Repetition, Repetition, Under Constant Supervision”

On Friday I wrap up the material and answer any student questions applying to my lectures and the lab. Additionally, I use Lippincott Connect case studies to start an in-class discussion. This discussion ends with the class taking the Case Study Quiz directly in Lippincott Connect during class. Around every two to three weeks, I give a traditional in-class test on the material. The test bank questions available in Lippincott Connect are valuable for designing an in-class test; I integrate my own questions from the material with some from the test bank. My goal is to write objective exam questions (usually multiple choice mixed with true/false and fill-in-the-blank questions). I found this mix gives the highest level of reliability when designing a relevant test.

During our class discussions I encourage my students to use the rationales and remediations available in Lippincott’s Connect to assist them with their answers. This format allows students to communicate using reliable ACSM material; not referencing AI options, which could be less trustworthy. When using this type of formative assessment, I find this is critical to providing closure on the topic and addressing any questions the students had during the week¹.

Tip #4 – Materials Promote Student Driven Learning - Weekly Topic and Focus on the Weekly Work Due

When experimenting to promote student driven learning, utilizing an LMS system paired with Lippincott Connect allows both the instructor and student flexibility and the ability to reinforce the material taught throughout the week. All weekly assignments are due by Sunday night at 11:59 pm. Lippincott Connect allows you to choose multiple time and due date options for exams, quizzes and other work assigned. Having flexibility in weekly deadlines helps students with busy schedules. My students have extremely busy schedules due to either their work or intercollegiate sports competitions over the weekend. 

Some tools unique to Lippincott Connect assist in student driven learning by ensuring students receive immediate feedback. The Hidden Reserve Prep U tests offer the instructor the option to customize in class assessment and assignments for home, and I know that all questions include rationales for right and wrong answers. This means no matter where my students are when they take PrepU quizzes, Chapter Proficiency Quizzes, video assessment, or Case Study Quizzes, they’re receiving feedback. Lippincott Connect also provides opportunities for remediation by pointing back to the text, and by using videos and Case Studies and the Stedman dictionary to provide additional support. This promotes student driven learning by encouraging students critical thinking skills.

Tip #5 – Immediate Grading Feedback Offers Professor Self-Assessment & Further Student Interaction

The most important step in my teaching strategy occurs in the first 5 minutes of each Monday’s class, when I request feedback from the students on the previous week’s work. This is very informal and immediate, but I can glean from it how the students learned the material and if I need to adjust the material to their needs.

The gradebook in Lippincott Connect under the “Results” tab allows Prep U options feedback on how my students are progressing. Not only do I have access to analytics that let me know who has performed chapter reading, but I also can see how each student has performed on quizzes. Assessment even accompanies videos, so I can view the data to ensure that students grasped the concepts within the videos. If I had Lippincott Connect set up to integrate with our LMS, I could have this data populate my grade book.

Conclusion

During the last year I started using Lippincott Connect in my university’s exercise prescription and assessment course. Initially motivated by the use of ACSM materials, I have experimented with the Lippincott Connect courseware platform and have discovered new and innovative teaching techniques to bring to my students. Further advances in the Lippincott technology will only further drive the students’ interactive educational experience, accelerating the learning potential for each individual student.

References

1. Nallaya, S., Gentili, S., Weeks, S., & Baldock, K. (2024). The validity, reliability, academic integrity and integration of oral assessments in higher education: A systematic review. Issues in Educational Research, 34(2), 629–646.

2. Peacock, J. L., FitzPatrick, K., & Finn, K. E. (2023). Student Performance and Perceptions of Adopting the Flipped Learning Approach into an Integrated Anatomy and Physiology Course. Journal of Higher Education Theory & Practice, 23(18), 145–161. https://doi.org/10.33423/jhetp.v23i18.6628

Dr. Dan Dieringer is an associate professor of Health and Human Performance at Bethel University (TN) for the past four years. He is also the coordinator of the Exercise Science major at Bethel University and is a professional member of the ACSM.

Resources

ACSM/Bayles: ACSM's Exercise Testing and Prescription, 2nd Edition | ISBN: 9781975214142 

For more information, or to request a demonstration of the new Lippincott^® Connect, please contact your sales representative. 

When I view the picture that accompanies this blog post, it reminds me of the old adage “Is the glass half full, or is it half empty?”

In the first week of July, I was able to fly out to Indianapolis to meet up with the ACSM Office of Museum, History and Archives’ liasons, Creative Services Manger David Brewer and Vice President of Operations Katherine Schowengerdt, as well as Interim CEO Katie Feltman. As many of you know, ACSM is selling the building that it has called home since the groundbreaking ceremony that occurred on Dec. 15, 1983. And now ACSM is looking to the future some 40+ years after the ground was broken in 1983. So it was my role, along with the ACSM staff, to go into the building and to secure the history of our organization collected since 1954 — some 70+ years!

I flew into Indianapolis on Monday, July 1, in preparation for our task. On Tuesday I was picked up by Katherine, and we were on our way to 401 West Michigan Street, our former headquarters. For those of you who may not know, the building has not been highly used since the pandemic started in early 2020, and on this hot summer day, the air conditioning wasn’t working either. There were two main aspects of the buidling that we were mainly focused on: the basement, where a number of our historical files have been kept throughout the years, and the room that was known as the ACSM Library. Our chief goal while there was to secure and preserve our history, mainly to be boxed up for storage, as ACSM begins to plan for our future.

The great thing about this visit is that it allowed multiple eyes to view what we had and what needed to be preserved. In large part, all of the historically relevant files and boxes in the basement were brought upstairs to be prepared for storage. And then, as we went through the ACSM Library, anything that referred to ACSM in any form was boxed up to be stored and reviewed at a later date. The task was not easy, and thankfully water was provided by Katherine on day one and by Dave on day two, for the heat rose to a very high level throughout each day. But all in all, we were able to stay relatively hydrated and felt confident that we were securing our organization’s history.

On that Tuesday evening, I was fortunate to have dinner with both Katherine and Dave as well as Katie. As a volunteer leader, one of the the common themes I thought about during this trip was just how invested ACSM leadership and its staff were in the preservation of our history — which there is a lot of! This was perhaps one of the highlights of my trip, leaving thinking about how highly invested our ACSM leaders are in the preservation of our history. Approximately 70+ years of ACSM history was secured and will be on its way to storage, if it isn’t there already. Our future task will be to go through this vast pile of history, or what I would call “historical gems,” such as the picture of a young Dr. Josephine Rathbone that I came across, or the picture of Drs. D.B. Dill and Per-Olof Åstrand conducting an aerobic performance assessment with a female subject on a treadmill.

It is the hope of our office, now that the securing of our history from the building has occurred, that with the help of an archivist in the future, we will be able to comb through all of it, organize and digitize it, and then develop a plan for how to best share it with the most important part of our organization: our membership.

Now, back to the picture at the top of this blog. Is the sun setting, or is it rising? Well, the sun is setting on this current ACSM property: I took this picture on the morning of my second day, and as I was getting in my Uber back to the airport to fly home, I honestly felt a little sad about the sale of our former headquarters. But then quickly after, I had feelings of excitement and hope thinking about ACSM as it moves forward. Because ACSM is more than just a building. It is a collection of people — staff, volunteer leaders and members. And as ACSM President Dr. Stella Volpe stated at the 2024 annual meeting held in Boston this year, “We are ACSM.”

So, the place ACSM calls home may change, but the “we” of ACSM is only growing. The sun is rising, and the glass is just not half full — it’s filling.

Sean Walsh, Ph.D., FACSM, is a professor in the Department of Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance at Central Connecticut State University. He is a past president of the New England Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine (NEACSM) and serves as the historian to both ACSM and NEACSM.