lex Fox-Alvarez, D.V.M. (’12), an assistant professor of small animal surgery at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine, has a reputation for taking innovative approaches to teaching.

So when COVID-19 safety measures implemented at UF meant fourth-year veterinary students were suddenly released from clinics on March 17 and faculty members needed to convert course content into an online format within one week, Fox-Alvarez turned a challenge into an opportunity for creative problem-solving.

“I wanted to make sure that my rounds included the elements of clinics that students would miss out on while away from the UF Small Animal Hospital,” Fox-Alvarez said.

The list was long: There would need to be client communication, taking a patient’s history, making a diagnostic plan and interpreting tests to determine the best next step in care. Skills typically learned by observation — including how to communicate findings to the client and develop plans for treatment and postoperative care, provide detailed surgical procedural explanations and even address ethical dilemmas — would need to be communicated by distance learning.

Fox-Alvarez reached for video, which he regularly used for surgical teaching during his residency training at UF and later as a faculty member. He scrambled to rework old surgery lectures into an online rounds format that would suffice to replicate the vast clinical experience for students over a relatively short period of time. When it soon became clear that students would remain away from clinics for longer than previously thought, his initial concept evolved into a platform that could deliver long-term online learning: Veterinary Isolated Clinical Education, or VICE, Rounds.

“I wanted to incorporate as many example case images and videos as possible so that students could have a more memorable experience with the case, which would hopefully help them understand the key points they would need to take away for use in practice,” he said. “I also wanted to make sure to include the experience of case rounds and discussing diseases and treatment options in a relaxed way in a small group with faculty.”

He created organized breaks in his initial rounds presentation to allow for discussion of key points immediately before they were illustrated in the slides, as well as worksheets for grading.

“These rounds are really fun to build and record, but doing a lecture well takes a lot of energy. It didn’t take long to realize what a monumental task creating a comprehensive online substitute for clinical education would be, especially in the face of the abrupt chaos falling upon all veterinary colleges at once,” he said.

“There was no way any one institution could do it alone, especially in a time frame fast enough to benefit the students now. Fortunately, Vet Med is a small, tightknit and passionate profession and I knew there would be colleagues elsewhere who would also be interested in making and volunteering their recorded rounds topics to benefit educators and students in our shared community.”

Fox-Alvarez then set up all the logistics online to get the crowd-sourced VICE Rounds operational and sent the initial call for volunteers to two surgery listservs where it spread and grew organically from there.

Volunteers contribute topic- and case-based rounds for on-demand streaming across teaching institutions, decreasing the pressure on each university to develop its own free-standing, off-site clinical curricula while managing urgent clinical needs, Fox-Alvarez said.

With the help of his wife, Stacey Fox-Alvarez, D.V.M. (’13), a third-year veterinary medical oncology resident, Fox-Alvarez continues to finetune the project, involving more colleagues from UF and other institutions, harnessing the collective energy and creativity to enhance content and students’ learning experiences in spite of the limitations in place.

Since its initial launch in March, the program has created over 60 recorded clinical topic rounds available for use from veterinary educators representing 11 veterinary universities and three private practices. In addition, they have had 11 live rounds sessions where students and educators from all veterinary colleges are welcome to come learn and discuss a topic. VICE Rounds has had more than 15,000 video views on YouTube and now has more than 600 veterinary educator and student subscribers.

“Our listserv of veterinary educators is now over 100 and represents faculty from veterinary colleges across the globe,” Fox-Alvarez said. “We also have a sign-up sheet with over 40 more topics in progress from a diverse team of educators. It’s been really great to see these resources utilized by veterinary educators as they make the touch transition to online or hybrid clinical education.”

The program was recently awarded $12,000 through an Innovations for Teaching Grant offered by the Veterinary Society of Surgical Oncology to support VICE Rounds’ transition from an emergency response education cooperative to a more formal and sustainable platform for educators to share recorded materials to support veterinary students and educators globally.