How to Teach Muscle Naming with Immersive Assignments

There are about 600 muscles in the human body—that’s a lot to memorize! When students understand the naming conventions behind muscles, it makes them easier to remember and gives students insights into their characteristics, like location, shape, and fiber orientation. 

However, many students have difficulty learning and staying engaged when staring at static images in a textbook. The human body is in 3D, so learning about it should be in 3D, too! By learning in 3D, students can get a fuller understanding of muscle movement and spatial relationships. 

In this blog post, we’ll explore the premade muscle naming immersive assignments in Courseware, Visible Body’s learning platform. In an immersive assignment, instructions guide students through 3D models, animations, simulations, and more as they progress through a series of activities and quizzes. 

An immersive assignment in Courseware. 

This set of immersive assignments is part of Visible Body’s library of free, premade content. We want to save instructors time and effort so they can focus on what they do best—teaching. Check out other premade content, including: 

• Courses, including popular textbook correlations
• Flashcard Decks
• Tours
• Labs

The anatomy of an immersive assignment

Let’s take a closer look at the premade muscle naming interactive assignments. When our team creates premade content, we start by looking at instructors’ needs. That way, we develop content like assignments, quizzes, and labs that align with how instructors actually teach. 

In addition to 3D learning, Visible Body is all about breaking complex concepts down into bite-sized pieces, so to cover muscle naming, our team built six assignments: 

• Introduction 
• Origin, insertion, and number of heads
• Fiber orientation
• Shape and movement
• Location 
• Relative descriptors

Each assignment is made up of activities and quizzes that walk students through concepts with rich, interactive visual aids. 

On the left side of the screen, instructions provide guidance and information, and students can follow those instructions to manipulate the 3D model in the center of the screen. The assignments center around 3D views of the muscular system, and several of them also feature interactive muscle actions. You can pause a muscle action at any time to take a closer look at the structures at play. 

An immersive assignment in Courseware. 

Click on a structure to select it! When a structure is selected, the info box pops up. By clicking on the different icons in the info box, students can... 

• Add a tag to the structure
• Fade or hide the structure
• Read a definition 
• Read about pathologies related to the structure
• Hear a pronunciation of the structure's name
• View attachments and insertions, blood supply, innervation, and other details (if the selected structure is a muscle)

An immersive assignment in Courseware. 

When a student has completed the instructions and is ready to proceed, clicking the Next button will bring them to the next activity. 

At the end of each of these assignments, a short multiple choice quiz checks students’ knowledge. Quizzes are automatically graded, and grades are logged into Courseware’s built-in Gradebook. Courseware can be used as a standalone LMS, or it can be integrated with several other LMS platforms to instantly send grades to your institution’s LMS.

Customize content easily

Premade content can be used straight out of the box, or it can serve as a jumping-off point for customization.

We’ve made the editing process simple and intuitive. Click on an immersive assignment and then click “Edit Assignment” to be brought to the assignment builder. From here, you can search for more content and add it with a click, and you can rearrange the order of activities by dragging and dropping them into place. You can also edit the instructions to better suit your students and your teaching style! 

Editing an immersive assignment in Courseware. 

Bring immersive assignments to your classroom

We're hard at work expanding our library! We currently have immersive assignments for the following subjects: 

• Anatomical terminology
• The plasma membrane
• Excitable tissues
• Muscle naming
• Cranial nerves
• Endocrine organs
• Circulatory system
• Immune cells
• Respiratory conduction
• Digestive system
• Urinary system
• Reproductive system

Immersive assignments are a new (beta) feature in Visible Body Courseware. If you don’t have access to Courseware yet, reach out to our team for a free instructor trial!

If you already have Courseware, follow these steps to add the premade assignments listed above to your course:

1. Click on this link to add premade immersive assignments to your Courseware account.
2. In this new course, click on the Bulk Editing tool, select the relevant folder(s), and click Copy. Choose the destination course and folder and copy.
3. Navigate to your existing course, where you will find the content you copied. Use the bulk editing tool to edit release and due dates and publish. 

Once the content is copied to your account, you can customize it to fit your class’s unique needs!

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Are you an instructor? We have award-winning 3D products and resources for your anatomy and physiology course! Learn more here.