Interactive Multimedia Courses on the Web:
Teaching Innovations in Biology and Chemistry
at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison
prepared for
The Institute on Learning Technology
part of the
Spring 2001
This quicklook also is available from the
Learning Through Technology web site,
http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/nise/ilt/
Interactive Multimedia Courses on the Web:
Teaching Innovations in Biology and Chemistry
Gabriele Wienhausen
Professor and Vice Chair for Education
Division of Biology
University of California, San Diego
gwienhausen@ucsd.edu
Why use technology?
When computer technology really got interesting, with desktop systems and software that
allowed you to create animations and sophisticated graphics, my colleague, Barbara Sawrey,
and I decided we could make a difference and change some of the problem areas we saw in
science education. Preparation is one of these problem areas: going into the lab and being
confronted with equipment that you’ve never seen before. Students see pictures and read
descriptions about using an Erlenmeyer flask and Pasteur pipettes or a spectral photometer, but
that’s not enough to eliminate the shyness when they first try to use them. The quality of
instruction can vary among teaching assistants, and the result is very uneven preparation that
requires a lot of lab time. We observed how lab time is spent, and we found that 50 percent or
more of lab is spent with housekeeping tasks. If you spend all your time telling students how to
put together a column, for example—“Make sure you don’t drop this, and you have to turn it this
way and not that way”—you really don’t have time for questions.
We decided to create an interactive laboratory manual—first on a CD-ROM and then on the
Web, after doing the CD proved too time-intensive—that gives students a chance to work with
the equipment on the screen and do the experiment before class. The students learn a
technique and the theory behind it on their own. In class, then, students can actually think about
the experiment—why they are doing it, why they are using certain equipment—and question
whether the data they gather makes sense. When you are working with live tissue, an
experiment is not always predictable. A good example is the spectral photometer. If you don’t
know what this equipment does, you will collect negative numbers that are absolutely
meaningless. Students do this and say, “Well, that’s what the instrument said.” We really want
them to say, “This does not make sense. What can I do?”
Our other main goal was to get away from just being a “talking book,” standing up and
presenting data and facts that we felt the students can get on their own much better if they have
the right tools. We wanted to use our time with the students to challenge them, to say: “You
learn the facts and the background yourself. Then we will talk together and really study and
work and struggle together—where we have to go back and forth with what we know, to think
very deeply, and I will help you with this learning process.”
UC San Diego is one of the top research universities in the country, with an elite but very
diverse student body that is expected to grow tremendously. The Biology program is huge, with
3,800 majors (the largest group of undergraduate majors at the University). Generally, the
introductory biology and chemistry courses serve about 300 students each quarter.
The strategy
When we started we had really naïve ideas of how to accomplish our goals. Our first project was
to create an interactive lab manual on CD-ROM for a conventional wet lab. What we really
learned is that this kind of work requires a unique team—if we did this on our own, we would not
be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. So we hired a programmer to program the
software and an artist who helped us with the images and the overall design of the software. It
made a big difference. But creating a CD-ROM was very expensive in terms of time and people
that you need. It also locks you in. It’s possible to make changes, but you have to hire the
programmer and the artist, and if another faculty wants to customize it to his use, it’s not easy.
The turnaround time was too great; it was very frustrating.
Meanwhile Web technology had made a really big leap in the last few years. I remember asking
the chemistry education postdoctoral fellow who came to work with us if we could make the
material accessible independent of the CD, that they can just go to a computer and dial in to get
the same material via the Internet. At first he said, ”No,” but then he came back and said,
“That’s an interesting thought.”
So we have started to work in this area, not focusing on a lab at first, because we need to do
more thinking and we are probably not quite there yet. But we started to do lecture work in
introductory chemistry courses, which are required for all biology majors before they take
biology courses. We thought, what happens if we have those lectures available at any time, online, that allows students to learn on-line with a lot of additional tools. So it’s not just a replication
of the lecture but also an expansion of the class. Then we can use the time in the lecture to
engage students intellectually at a higher level, with interactive work, collaborative work,
thinking about case studies and problems.
We have finished this project; we taped the lectures and we’ve put them on-line with additional
work so the students can follow the lecture in a very different way. They have additional material
that helps them understand, they can look at it over and over, they can search for certain topics,
and they get quizzes on-line so they can check their understanding.
In the summer, we took it a step further and offered one of the courses for the first time as an
on-line course. The production was relatively easy because we had a very, very good teacher;
we taped and then digitized the lecture; and then again we annotated and enriched the material
considerably. So the turnaround time was very fast, and it was produced so that even students
with a dinky modem can look at the material at home without any loss in quality. We also stay in
contact with the students via e-mail.
Ultimately, we want to videotape procedures for biology lab courses and show them on-line, and
also show animations on-line. But we started with the chemistry courses because it was an
easier task for us to try first. We are in contact with the students via e-mail, but our goal is to be
in contact with they in a synchronous mode; again, the technology is not quite there yet for the
number of students participating in this class. We want to go beyond the chat room kind of
interactions, because as soon as you have more than four people, it just doesn’t work anymore.
Meanwhile, since the technology is coming up very fast, we’re also developing the infrastructure
to allow that to happen.
The courses
The original course for the Interactive Lab Manual was “Biochemical Techniques,” an
introductory biochemistry/molecular biology wet lab course serving _____students. The Web-
based chemistry courses comprise a one-year sequence of three general chemistry courses:
Chemistry 6A-C. These three courses, each serving ____ students, are required for the biology
major. These are lecture courses, but there are lots of visuals and lots of experiments done in
front of the students.
The learning Technology
Interactive Lab Manual (ILM): We created this multimedia CD for the laboratory course,
“Biochemical Techniques,” to allow students a “virtual hands-on” experience and prepare them
better for actual time in a convention wet lab. The CD is available on computers maintained by
the Biology Division and available to all students. The ILM is non-linear; students can choose
any modules they are interested in or need to work on more intensively. For example, the
“Experiments” modules provide simulations of exercises in a wet lab, while the “Techniques”
modules give demonstrations of equipment use, such as spectrophotometry procedures, among
others. The presentation of the material is very sophisticated, and the spectral photometer really
is a piece of virtual equipment. And, keeping in mind that today’s undergraduates grew up with
video games, the ILM presents the materials with extra twists and “pizzazz” integrated into the
ILM to surprise students and keep them engaged.
You can see sample screen shots from the ILM CD-ROM at http://www-mill.ucsd.edu/. This
Website also has links to the preliminary Website version of the ILM CD, put up on the Web by
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funded the CD-ROM project. Remember, however,
that Web technology is not quite equal to CD-ROM technology; the simulations on the Website
will not be quite as impressive. You can read more about the ILM at
http://www.hhmi.org/BeyondBio101/ucsd.htm.
Online Chemistry Course: You can view sample pages from the Chemistry 6B course Website
at http://chem6B.ucsd.edu.
The funding
We funded this project with money from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
(http://www.hhmi.org); from the National Science Foundation; from the University of California,
San Diego; and from the University of California System.
The results
The students are really excited about the Web-based courses, but we do get mixed messages. I
think some are afraid, just as many faculty are, that this will result in a decrease in facultystudent interactions. That’s absolutely not what we have in mind—we want increased interaction
and at a higher level. We didn’t get that feedback from the CD because the students understood
its purpose and really, really liked it. They felt they got out of it exactly what we were hoping
they would: a much higher-level preparation and feeling more confident coming into the lab and
talking about the issues in the lab. Also, many of our students have English as a second
language, and this medium allows them to learn at their own pace and repeat what they don’t
understand.
We really came to understand that we were working as a team. That’s a new kind of situation for
many of our faculty; we’re so used to doing things alone and not depending on somebody else.
But to do something like this, you have to get out of that mode. We’re trying to produce
something that is technically very easy to use, easy to custom tailor, and easy to modify and
annotate. To start this from scratch you do need technical support and you do need money.
This whole process helped Barbara and me become much better teachers, because when you
put together such an instructional tool, you have to rethink what you are doing in the classroom,
throw away your old yellow notes, and start all over again. It really helped to have the
programmer and the artist there—they didn’t have the background and when they asked
questions, we realized how poorly we described something or how misleading our descriptions
were. It has been a very rewarding process for us, the teachers.
If you have any questions, you can contact me at: gwienhausen@ucsd.edu.
LINKS
Chemistry 6B:
http://chem6B.ucsd.edu/
Lecture 1 on-line from Chem 6B:
http://chem6B.ucsd.edu/videoLectures/lecture1.html
Multimedia Interactive Learning Laboratory:
http://www-mill.ucsd.edu/
Organic chemistry screen shot:
http://www-mill.ucsd.edu/millWeb/resources/graphics/projects/oChem2.jpg
Introductory chemistry screen shot:
http://www-mill.ucsd.edu/millWeb/resources/graphics/projects/chem.jpg
Chemistry Program:
http://www-chem.ucsd.edu/
Biology Program:
http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/
Howard Hughes Medical Institute:
http://www.hhmi.org/