Bridging Basic Science and Clinical Practice with TBL at Touro University, College of Osteopathic Medicine

At Touro University, College of Osteopathic Medicine, in Vallejo, California, Team-Based Learning (TBL) is used to help students connect foundational biomedical science with clinical application. Dr. Chitra Pai, Professor of Microbiology, Director of Clinical Education Integration, and Course Coordinator for the Integrated Systems course, uses TBL across five courses and eight modules with cohorts of approximately 190 students in the College of Osteopathic Medicine program and 100 students in the Master of Sciences in Medical Health Sciences program.

Sessions are conducted every 2-3 weeks in a semester, with students working in permanent, diverse teams.

TBL is delivered through a flipped-classroom model, where students complete preparatory learning before class and use scheduled class time for individual and team readiness assurance, discussion, and application of knowledge to clinical scenarios.

Touro also uses TBL in its Master of Science in Medical Health Sciences courses, including a hybrid format that brings together on-campus and online students in the same synchronous learning experience.

Bridging Foundational Science and Clinical Application

A key challenge in preclinical medical education is helping students move beyond learning biomedical concepts in isolation and applying them to patient care. To address this, Dr. Pai adapted the conventional TBL framework around an Integration Triad:

The Integration Triad framework used by Dr. Chitra Pai to connect clinical encounters, pathogen analysis and pathogenesis, and patient care within TBL.

Students work through realistic clinical cases that require them to connect microbiology, pathology, pharmacology, patient care including diagnostics, therapeutics, epidemiology, and prevention. Instead of focusing on recall of factoids during the readiness assurance tests, students solve clinical cases individually and in teams to apply medical knowledge through clinical reasoning to solve problems pertaining to the etiology, underlying pathogenesis, diagnostics and management as well as prevention of diseases. As each case develops, teams must make specific clinical decisions and justify their reasoning.

This approach shifts the emphasis from recalling individual facts to integrating knowledge across disciplines and applying it in a clinical context.

Putting this model into practice effectively and efficiently however requires faculty to coordinate the full TBL workflow, manage and reuse relevant content across sessions, adapt delivery for different learning formats, and respond to student performance in real time.

Bringing Clinically Integrated TBL to Life with InteDashboard

InteDashboard provides the digital infrastructure to bring these different elements together in one place, helping faculty manage clinically integrated TBL across courses, cohorts, and delivery formats.

Centralizing the TBL Workflow

Faculty can organize prework, iRATs, tRATs, and application activities within courses and modules, creating a structured workflow for each TBL session.

An example of a course with its various modules and respective iRAT & tRAT activities

InteDashboard also provides centralized question banks with folders. The metadata tagging also makes it easier to organize and reuse assessment items, while flexible scoring allows faculty to configure points differently across iRAT and tRAT activities.

An example of a question bank in InteDashboard that can be shared among colleagues

Existing modules and courses can also be copied for future use, making it easy to set up new activities for a different class on InteDashboard without having to duplicate items multiple times.

InteDashboard’s LTI integration with Canvas and various LMSes further simplifies access by allowing students to launch activities through the institution’s existing LMS without a separate login.

InteDashboard also calculates activity scores based on the configured scoring settings and allows faculty to export grades at the activity or course level.

Adapting TBL to Different Learning Formats

InteDashboard gives faculty flexibility in how and when different parts of TBL are delivered. Activities can be configured for synchronous or asynchronous use, which is particularly useful when students have different accommodation requirements.

For example, faculty can allow selected students to complete an iRAT asynchronously and within an appropriate time window, without changing the structure of the activity for the rest of the class.

Dr. Pai also values the ability to reset activities when needed. If she notices an error in a question or needs to make an adjustment even after an activity has been published, she can reset the activity and publish it again with a few clicks.

This provides a level of flexibility that is difficult to achieve with physical IF-AT scratch-off cards, where an activity cannot simply be reset once students have begun.

The same flexibility supports Touro’s hybrid Master of Science in Medical Health Sciences courses, where on-campus and online cohorts can participate in TBL synchronously using InteDashboard alongside Zoom breakout rooms. This allows faculty to maintain the same structured TBL process even when students are participating from different locations.

Using Real-Time Data to Guide Facilitation

InteDashboard’s real-time teacher dashboard gives faculty real-time visibility into how students and teams are progressing during a TBL session. Dr. Pai can monitor incoming iRAT and tRAT scores, completion rates, and response distributions as the activity unfolds, rather than waiting until after class to review results.

The dashboard also helps her manage the pacing of the session. Faculty can see how many students have completed or submitted an activity, how many have timed out, and the average time taken to answer questions.

This helps Dr. Pai assess whether the allotted time is appropriate and determine when additional time may be needed.

InteDashboard’s item analysis provides a deeper view of how the class performed on individual questions. Faculty can quickly identify questions with high fail rates, see how responses were distributed across answer choices, and review the average time students spent on each item.

This helps Dr. Pai to pinpoint the concepts that require greater attention during clarification and focus valuable class time on areas where students struggled the most.

Together, these insights allow Dr. Pai to move from simply reviewing scores to using real-time evidence to guide clarification, discussion, and instructional decisions while the learning is progressing.

From Memorization to Clinical Reasoning

For Dr. Pai, the broader goal of TBL is to move students beyond rote memorization and toward active, collaborative clinical reasoning. Through TBL activities built around realistic clinical scenarios, students are guided to connect foundational science with clinical decision-making.

InteDashboard supports that process by providing a structured way to deliver readiness assurance tests, team discussions, application exercises, and real-time feedback within one workflow. Rather than technology driving the pedagogy, the platform helps make a more clinically integrated TBL model easier to organize, facilitate, and adapt across different teaching formats.

As Dr. Pai frames it, the bigger objective is to help transform “brilliant, passive students” into critical-thinking, diagnostic physicians.

To see how this approach works in practice, watch Dr. Pai’s customer demo recording below or book a demo with our team to explore how InteDashboard can support TBL at your institution.