Cyberbiochemist - Open Educational Resources for Biosciences Teaching

摘要

Since computers and (slightly later) the Internet first became widely available in education, teachers and lecturers in all subjects and at all levels have been creating and sharing computer-based teaching materials. There can be enormous advantages to sharing teaching resources. It can save an enormous amount of time: if someone else has gone to the trouble of creating a demonstration of enzyme kinetics or an animation of DNA replication, for example, why reinvent the wheel? But this approach also has its disadvantages. Lecturers, who very often have busy research laboratories to run, need to take time to search for suitable materials, evaluate them not only for overall quality, but also for suitability for a particular class at a particular level and check what the original authors allow others to do with them. It is all but self-evident that use of others material should be acknowledged, but only some authors allow their material to be adapted as well as directly reused: and, in any case, what about a single PowerPoint slide? It can be as time-consuming, although not as complex, to select and evaluate appropriate resources from the enormous selection that is available, or apparently available, online as to write them yourself.