Biology is a very visual/graphic subject. In my teaching of biology here at Carnegie Mellon University, I have come to rely on the use of images, graphs and diagrams to both convey and reinforce concepts. I have moved away from a classical chalkboard lecture format to one in which I lecture about and explain images, graphs and diagrams which are displayed to the students in the lecture hall by some sort of projection. How students take "notes" in this type of lecture is problematic. The use of the computer in delivering and storing lecture content has provided a means to increase the productivity of lecturing while also providing students access to accurate information from which they may later study. The Web offers a remarkably rich environment in which one can deliver educational materials and receive feedback from students.
I have developing Web support materials for the introductory freshman biology course (Modern Biology, 03-121) and an upper division molecular biology course (Molecular Biology of Prokaryotes, 03-441). These include text, images, animations, movies, online questions and answers (old exams) and Web-based bboards. In addition, I have integrated Web technology into the molecular biology course. Since 1996, I have required that the term papers for 03-441 be handed in by “electronically publishing” it as a Web document.
A single set of HTML documents for these courses can be used for both lecture support and as notes to study from. By using conditional <HIDE> and <SHOW> commands, which are an extension of the standard set of Server Side Includes (SSI), I can serve a single Web source page in different ways suitable for either use. This eliminates the need for creating different sets of documents for different purposes. To use such commands they must be implemented on the server from which your pages are served. When supplemental material was originally designed for the courses described above, the information was served by our departmental server which supported these SSI extensions. The course material is now served from university managed servers which do not have these extensions, so it is not feasible now to show a live version of this effect. However, the effect can be visualized by comparing the lecture vs studying version of the same file on tryptophan operon attenuation which has been manually processed.
The conditional representation of the same page in two different views is controlled by how the user logs in to a page which requires a username and password.
Before the advent of commercial course management software, I finished a version of a Web-based FileMakerPro database containing biology multiple choice questions. This database was conncected to the Web-based course material to use it as a question source for online reinforcement and quizzes. Again, this approach was superceded by the development of such applications in course management system. Migration of my course material from our local server to the university's servers has made this application obsolete. However, if someone is interested in my implementation, e-mail me for information.
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