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The Harvey Project is a worldwide collaboration to build and distribute free, Web-based rich content for teaching physiology. Project members include physiologists, medical professionals, educators, students, programmers, instructional designers, illustrators and web designers dedicated to using the Internet to advance the teaching of physiology. All donate their time and effort to contribute to the Project. The course materials being developed include simulations, animations and 3-D models, as well as online testing and evaluation. They are also peer-reviewed and based on accepted educational and technical standards. All content and tools developed are open and non-proprietary.
Building rich content requires a wide range of skills and an extravagance of time and effort. If faculty are to play a major role in constructing such learning objects, they must collaborate and share their skills and efforts. The Harvey Project is such a collaboration. Interest in rich content and online learning is spreading quickly in higher education and this "open course" model represents a new and promising paradigm for online content development.
The Harvey Project aims to build rich, educational content for physiology, not to create a complete online course nor compete with existing course offerings. The Project is also creating standards and guidelines to direct the creation of effective rich content, as well as a variety of software tools to facilitate building lectures, modules, courses and quizzes. The Project also includes a database of physiology teaching materials on the Web, similar to MERLOT but specific to physiology.
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