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The Role of Educational Technology(3:53) The use of technology in the classroom has had a profound effect on the way that teachers teach and students learn...[view this segment] Life @ Harvard Medical School(5:07) The Harvard Medical School community is wide and varied and also increasingly mobile...[view this segment] Pedagogical Evolution(7:34) Dr. David Roberts often reminds his students that it was only ten years ago that he himself was a student. In those ten years, though, much has changed...[view this segment] Multiple Teaching and Learning Styles(6:47) Human Systems Explorer interactive modules are just one in a host of educational tools that professors use to teach Harvard Medical School's varied student body...[view this segment] Interactive Teaching Tools(6:00) The genesis of the Human Systems Explorer project can be traced to 1999, when web-based tools were becoming more prominent...[view this segment] Creation of the Human Systems Explorer(9:07) Though each Human Systems Explorer diagram is attractive and functional, this graceful simplicity belies a rigorous development process...[view this segment] Human Systems Explorer Technology(3:21) One of the most important features of the Human Systems Explorer is its wide availability for members of the Harvard Medical School community...[view this segment] Student Usability Testing of Modules(4:31) A vital part of any module's design process is testing its functionality with the students...[view this segment] Human Systems Explorer: Student Tutorial Integration(3:05) The flexibility to integrate the Human Systems Explorer modules into a wide variety of learning environments is one of the project's many great successes....[view this segment] Interactive Teaching Diagrams: Clinical Applications(5:39) Ultimately, the hope is that this technology will help train bright, flexible, intuitive doctors, who are comfortable applying medical principles to patients in a hospital setting...[view this segment] Future Human Systems Exploration(4:08) The great success of the Human Systems Explorer project at Harvard Medical School has set the stage for the development of additional tools that harness the capabilities of web-based multimedia technologies...[view this segment] |
Human Systems Explorer TechnologyOne of the most important features of the Human Systems Explorer is its wide availability for members of the Harvard Medical School community. CIO Dr. John Halamka, who considers himself a "standards guy" and champions cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, is proud of the fact these interactive modules are accessible online anywhere, at any time, on any device-be it on fast broadband or slow dialup connections, on campus or at home, and even in classroom demonstrations. This is possible, in part, because Dr. Michael Parker has designed the diagrams in a program called Adobe Flash™. As the name suggests, advertisers originally used Flash to add visually arresting extras, or "flash," to web pages; it was an animation-only program. Over the past several years, the creators of Flash added what Dr. Parker calls a "rich programming language," which made development of complex modules possible. To create the modules, Dr. Parker first puts together sophisticated visuals for the diagrams, sometimes by importing material that he has created in other design program, such as Adobe Illustrator™, Adobe Fireworks™, or Adobe Photoshop™, into Flash. He says that this artwork component is usually less than 10 or 20 percent of the time involved in creation of a diagram. Next, he converts the mathematical model that underlies the medical concept he's working on into program code, what he calls the "guts" of the code that will drive the visuals that students see on the screen. Dr. Parker estimates that these two phases require on average from 60 to 80 hours per module, and sometimes many more depending on the complexity of the mathematical model. The challenge, always, is for the diagram on the screen to flawlessly reflect the underlying scientific model-without the students getting bogged down in his behind-the-scenes computations. Students should walk away from diagrams with an intuitive sense for what's happening in some aspect of physiology and, in certain cases, how changing parameters on the screen might change the output of a whole physiological system. Effective visuals make this possible, as opposed to "just putting numbers on the screen," says Dr. Parker, "which would not be as helpful." |
