The Harvey Project: Open Course Development of Rich Content for Physiology

Robert S. Stephenson

Wayne State University

Abstract:

Rich content, such as simulations, animations, 3-D models and interactive quizzes and tutorials, helps students to learn better, learn more, remember better and enjoy it more. The difficulty, of course, is that developing such dynamic, interactive content requires the skills of programmers, researchers, teachers, graphic artists and instructional designers, as well as vast numbers of man-hours. The Harvey Project (http://harveyproject.org) is doing this for physiology by following the model of the free software/open source movement.

The Open Course approach is:

· faculty collaboration across a discipline to build rich content

· adherence to open standards wherever possible

· peer review of developed materials (for scholarly accuracy, technical soundness and pedagogical effectiveness)

· free distribution of the products to schools and universities.

The Harvey Project - which includes researchers, teachers, students, programmers and designers from around the world - has developed numerous applets and animations for teaching physiology. The goal of the Harvey Project is to empower individual faculty to use rich content in their courses, and to contribute to its development if they wish. To this end it has developed several tools for integrating the applets and other Web-based materials into a practical course. One of these is Beads&String, a system of open source tools to build presentations or online course chapters out of individual Web pages.

Supported by NSF DUE-9951384.

Benefit in Attending Session:

• It will introduce them to the notion of an open course project, and the advantages it presents for developing rich content.
• It will present the Harvey Project, with its collection of free rich content for physiology and its searchable database of hundreds of physiology teaching resources elsewhere on the Web.
• It will introduce (and be built with) Beads&String, a tool to assenble a collection of Web pages into a sequence that students can follow.

PRIMARY AUTHOR'S INFORMATION

Dr. Robert S. Stephenson

Dept. of Biol. Sciences

5047 Gullen Mall

Wayne State University

Detroit MI 48202

Telephone Number: 313 577-2869

Fax Number: 313 577-6891

E-mail Address: rstephe@sun.science.wayne.edu

Web Site: http://www.harveyproject.org/