Robert S. Stephenson, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Wayne State University
rstephe@sun.science.wayne.edu,
http://www.science.wayne.edu/~rstephe
Click below to view the illustrations for this presentation in a new window.
A copy of this presentation may be found at http://lessons.harveyproject.org/presentations/TOHE/
Putting your course online in the form of HTML slides, syllabus and so forth may make it more accessible to students, but does nothing at all to improve how and what the students learn. The true role of the Internet in higher education is to deliver "rich content," i.e. interactive multimedia, animations, simulations, 3-D, interactive quizzes and anything else that will give students a more involving and enriching experience of the material than they could get from a textbook or lecture slides. Such rich content can be just as valuable in the classroom as it is for online learners.
The catch, of course, is that developing effective rich content is much more difficult than using PowerPoint's "convert to HTML" feature or building static Web pages. I am proposing that the most effective way for universities and colleges to develop such materials is by collaborations along the lines of what I would call the "open course" model.
The essential features of an open course project are :
Collaboration and widespread participation are necessary to provide the many skills to build rich content, and to make the work move faster. If examples in the field of software design are any guide, it can also lead to a more accurate and effective course by incorporating diverse viewpoints. The Free Software or Open Source collaborations have produced many examples of sophisticated, world-class software such as the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server.
Materials developed under this paradigm must be peer reviewed to ensure that they are scientifically accurate, pedagogically effective and technically sound before being released to the public. This is essential to ensure the quality and integrity of the content and the trustworthiness of the project. Peer review is also needed so that contributors receive proper credit for their work. As much intellectual effort and scholarship go into building a module of rich course materials as into writing a chapter in a textbook or publishing most research papers. If an open course project is peer reviewed, those who help build it will be able to claim publication credit towards promotion, tenure or raises.
Conformance to recognized standards is necessary to ensure that different materials will be compatible with each other, and that they will be as widely useful as possible. These include Web standards (HTML, Javascript, Java, Macromedia Flash, etc.), design guidelines (for appearance, user interface, bandwidth and hardware requirements, etc.), educational standards such as IMS, curricular standards and, of course, pedagogical standards.
Openness means that, without charge, educational institutions can use, copy and modify the rich content so long as they give the original authors credit and the modified content is made open in the same sense. Making the materials open is essential to encourage their widespread adoption and improvement. It also fosters a spirit of cooperation, non-competitiveness and humanitarianism that helps attract others to the enterprise.
Volunteerism is the locomotive of open course projects, but it can't run without fuel. Since open course projects are non-proprietary, they must rely for support on the contributions of host institutions and granting agencies.
Developing rich content is essential to the continued financial health and effectiveness of higher education institutions. Open course collaborations promise to provide this for dimes on the dollar compared to proprietary or commercial development. It is in the interest of university administrators to encourage this activity of their faculty with grants, incentives and release time. Granting agencies with an interest in educational quality and the health of our university system should be prepared to fund such open course initiatives.
The first implementation of the open course model is the Harvey Project, a collaboration to build an online, interactive human physiology course. The project is named after Sir William Harvey, the 17th Century English physician and teacher. A pioneer of physiology, Harvey was renowned for discovering the circulation of the blood and for the clarity of his exposition.
The goal of the Harvey Project is to create rich content and tools that will empower individual faculty to create their own world-class physiology course. The project is not about creating a free online course or textbook, nor about competing with existing institutions. It is a collaboration in support of physiology faculty everywhere.
Physiology teachers, researchers, physicians and students from around the world collaborate on the Harvey Project with programmers, Web designers, medical illustrators and instructional designers. I launched the project in July of 1998, and it now (September 1999) counts 75 participants in seven countries. At the center of this collaboration is an interactive Website (http://harveyproject.org).
The project aims to create rich content for teaching all aspects of human physiology. When complete, these materials will cover physiology not only in its breadth but also in depth, since the range of materials is intended to satisfy students from advanced high schoolers, through undergraduates and nursing students, to medical students. Specifically, the rich content includes animations, simulations, 3-D models, interactive problem solving and online quizzes. It incorporates the best teaching materials and methods that are publicly available, and is designed to help students master underlying principles. A guideline is to make almost every screen interactive, so as to draw students into the material and foster interest and understanding.
The basic unit of the Harvey Project is a building block consisting of one or a few Web pages with embedded rich content that explain a basic concept, such as how myelin speeds propagation of the action potential, for example. Most blocks are designed to be useful in lectures, and are therefore more graphical than textual.
The project is building several tools to allow faculty to assemble these blocks into larger modules to create materials for a lecture or to build a chapter of an online course. One is a system of navigation that allows a professor to choose which blocks to cover in which order, like stringing beads on a thread. He then hands this "thread" to his students for them to follow. This bead-and-thread system allows one instructor to assign her students blocks A, B, D and F in that order, while another class may be using the same materials at the same time in the order F, E, B, A, C. The illustrations that accompany this presentation were put together using this technique.
The goal of the Harvey Project is to have its course materials adopted as widely as possible. It seeks to achieve this through
To attract physiologists to the Harvey Project Website, the project also has a searchable database of physiological sites elsewhere on the Web. Each site is described and classified according to topic and whether it includes rich content. The list of sites is interactive, so anyone can add a new site to the list or make a comment on an existing one. The database currently includes about 650 Web pages.
The Website database is also a good way to identify potential contributors. The most effective way to recruit participants to the project has been to contact those who had started to build similar materials on their own. These developers have much needed technical skills, they are quick to understand the benefits of a collaboration such as the Harvey Project and often they have already built materials that can be incorporated directly into the project.
Besides the database of physiology sites and a compendium of course materials developed by the project, the Website includes profiles of members, a calendar of events and a list of ongoing projects. A version-tracking repository keeps records of who is working on which project, as well as saving the latest and all previous versions. Other collaborative tools include a list server, an online bulletin board and conferences with both Internet chat and telephone. Plans include organizing an annual conference as a satellite to a national scientific meeting.
More information about the Harvey Project is available on its Website at http://harveyproject.org .
The open course movement is very young, and it is too early to tell whether it will live up to its promise. But it offers an attractive solution to the serious challenge of building rich content and moving university teaching into the wired future.
Supported by the US National Science Foundation, grant #DUE-9951384.