Development of instructional visual and audio-visual resources

Project Title	Development of instructional visual and audio-visual resources
Principal Investigator	Pamela Kalas
Faculty	Science
Funding Year	2003
Project Summary	One of the challenges for students in Biology introductory courses is visualizing the complexity of the systems, as well as that of the studies and discussed in class. In many cases, no appropriate illustrations are available to help with this or, if they are available, they are part of costly textbook or other proprietary resources. In this project we aim to develop (or further develop/refine) a series of visual and audio-visual resources targeting elements of Biology that are often challenging for students, with the purpose of improving the available teaching resources and enhance student learning. Through an iterative process of consultations, feedback, and refining we will make these resources fully accessible, editable, flexible, and publicly available through CC licenses. Some of these resources will enhance and complement currently existing materials (which will be refined and alsoshared widely under CC), while others will be stand-alone. All of them will be fully accessible Objectives/deliverables: One video addressing essential, yet rarely mentioned elements of pedigree analysis; One set of graphics illustrating and clarifying key differences among different types of scientific studies (e.g. correlational studies, observational studies, controlled experiments) within one specific context (e.g., investigating the relationships between presence of fish in a pond and number of species/biodiversity existing at that pond). One set of graphics to illustrate and clarify in a student-accessible way a complex experiment presented in the literature, and its results. This set of graphics/illustrations will be integrated into a currently existing worksheet about the experiment, which students have an exceedingly hard time visualizing, but could also be used on their own and integrated into any materials on experiment design.
Project Poster	Pictures over Paragraphs: Illustrations to improve teaching and learning resources
Grant type	OER Rapid Innovation Grant
Funded Amount	$1,325