An international collaboration of educators, researchers, physicians, students, programmers, instructional designers and graphic artists working together to build a highly interactive human physiology course on the Web. Materials produced will be made freely available.

COLLABORATION Subscribing to the HARVEYPROJ Listserv Archives of the HARVEYPROJ Listserv Harvey Project Bulletin Board GUIDELINES A Plan for Development Document as We Go Standards Technical Specifications CONTENT General Physiology Nervous System Sensory System Endocrine System Muscle Heart Circulation Respiration Kidney Digestion Immunity Reproduction

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A Plan for Development

1. Begin with a few foci. Out of the whole field of physiology, choose to start with a few areas of personal interest to us. Where possible, integrate or adapt material we have already done or that we are currently working on (e.g. for a class). The best way to make a big snowball is to start with a little one.
2. Address technical issues. Once part 1 is underway and we have a credible direction, recruit more technically inclined people (I suspect this won't be too hard) to attack a number of key issues. These include creating style sheets and templates for the entire project, creating a mechanism for page-to-page navigation and another for navigating by concept map, creating a mechanism to administer and correct unit quizzes and save the results to a database, choosing a method for adding an optional audio track to the pages (for self study), and others. We also need to recruit illustrators and graphic design people to work with us, as well as instructional designers.
3. Rewrite the preliminary pages to incorporate these improvements.
4. Test the results on real, live students and note the results carefully.
5. Iterate steps 1-4 until done.

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1. A map of the concepts we intend (sooner or later) to cover and how they are related to each other (this will be reused later for navigation).
2. The units that will make up the section.
3. The specific pedagogic objective(s) of each unit (these will provide a basis for making up the unit quiz).
4. A rough description of each web page making up the unit and what it will do (if it does anything).

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• The Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project.
• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the W3C.
• The American Physiological Society is in the process of defining a standard physiology curriculum for medical schools.
• There is a need to develop physiology-specific metadata that can describe exactly what topic a lesson covers and what place it occupies in the overall discipline.

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• Project materials must be usable with students' current technology:

• No more than 10 s to download at 28.8 kb/s, so no more than 30 kB per page.
• No browser-dependant features
• Java on the client must be JDK 1.02 compliant
• Servlets and faculty development tools can and should use latest JDK, as well as XML
• Design for 640x480x256 color resolution
• A limited amount of optional material might take advantage of more advanced technologies (JDK 1.1 Java applets, VRML, dHTML, XML)

• Overall template and style sheets
• Use Java, ECMAScript (Javascript), animated GIFs, Flash or (possibly) dHTML for interactivity, as appropriate
• To support the broadest variety of browsers and platforms, the major tools will probably be HTML, Java (JDK 1.02) and those javascript features that are browser-independent.
• Authors' names and email addresses on every page for feedback and comments
• Primary language of development: English
• All materials should be designed with translation into other languages in mind

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