The General Biology Program is located within the College of Biological Sciences and we have administrative responsibility for four introductory biology courses here at the University of Minnesota and primary instructional responsibility for two of these. Approximately 3500 students -- both majors and non-majors -- attend our two main courses (Biology 1001 and Biology 1009) annually, working with dozens of teaching assistants and faculty members.

General Biology initially focused on the development of multimedia content for use in large lecture rooms. Here, an instructor can use a presentation computer permanantly connected to a large projector to show images and animations, use various software applications and go online to take advantage of Web-based material.

	Faculty working with our program can present content drawn from our multimedia library that currently consists of nearly 4000 separate image, sound, animation and movie files. Working with a graduate student teaching assistant, they can also produce new content specifically tailored to their needs by using our multimedia workstations.

We have also integrated multimedia into the laboratory components of our courses. Lab rooms have presentation systems similar to the equipment in the lecture rooms where instructors can present introductory material for each laboratory exercise. In Biology 1201, T.A.s can also demonstrate the software the students will be using. Students in 1201 generally work in pairs on both wet lab exercises (e.g., Drosophila crosses and artificial selection in Wisconsin Fast Plants) and computer-based investigations on various topics in evolutionary biology and ecology. We have begun to implement computer-mediated content into Biology 1009 as well.

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These pages were developed by Mark Decker and Rick Peifer and are maintained by the General Biology Program at the University of Minnesota. Questions and comments should be directed to webmaster@genbiol.cbs.umn.edu
Page URL: http://genbiol.cbs.umn.edu/activities/activities.html Last modified: 07/22/99