I have spent all my years working on my online courses
working hard NOT to fall into the ‘cookie cutter’ mode. What I mean is I work
to avoid, at all costs, posting publisher-provided power point lectures,
followed by publisher-provided handouts, culminating in publisher-provided
assessments. Blah! Yuck! Spew! If an instructor was going to do that, then why
don’t we just hire more ITS guys to post this stuff for us and then the
instructor would really not have to do anything, heck maybe we don’t even need
that instructor. (Note, this is not a bash on ITS guys since they are the BEST
and we would be pretty much a body full of ideas and no one to help us get the
ideas into reality… it is about instructors just being ‘up loaders’ and not ‘instructors’).
So, what I am saying is I try to ‘teach’ and ‘create’ from scratch, every idea
I want to get across. I have a textbook I recommend student use to follow along
(of course they don’t need the high dollar newest version since I teach anatomy
and no one has spouted new arms lately so it does not change much). But I make
my videos, supplemental material and exams based on the learning outcomes and
the content I put together. But has it worked out? I spent years avoiding the ‘plug-and-play’
from the publisher-provided content and web sites. Buuuuut…. this semester, I
decided to play with fire. Can I play with the ‘publisher gadgets’ and still be
original. Can I be authentic? 
So
here is what I did. I had my students pay for access to a publisher provided online
virtual cadaver program ($35.00). I was thinking, that just giving them the ‘goodie
bag’ of sheep brains and eyeballs may not be enough. The online images I have
are not that great and the publisher lured me in with great imagery and content….
but don’t they all? I was looking for a program or book or CD or app that my
students could use that would show them cadaver images (quality images not
gross ones, if there is such a thing for cadavers). This was important to me because a few years ago (when I last dabbled in this and used a program from another publisher) one of the
comments on my student evaluation was about the images they had to
view “looked like a coyote got to it before the photographer did”. After that
I had sworn off this type of content and doubled my efforts to make ALL of my own content without ANY help
from the publisher.
However, the program I found, I have to say has the best
images I have seen. I am pretty excited that it even lets you use a slider bar
to look deeper into the body so you can see the relationship of one feature to
the next. In addition, with just the click of a button, you can have all the
instructor-designated features shown so students know what they are supposed to
be looking for (the program has a list that an instructor chooses their
features from so there are no items labeled that they don’t need to know). That
was exactly what I was looking for. Then the bonus, it included microscope
slides and radiologic images (x-ray, MRI, PET scans).
But how do I use it and
still make my class, my class? Well the answer is I don’t know, but I like the
program and I am working to integrate it into the class like a lab that they
can do from home. In fact the cadaver images and slides are better than what
they would see if they were in the classroom. The bottom line is that I have my
standards and I can evolve and incorporate or throw out things as I go along.
And just because I used the ‘coyote-ate’ images years ago, I was not so scarred
to not give it another try. That is a day in the life of an online instructor
that just can’t leave well enough alone and just do the same thing over again.
Never stagnate, keep changing and mostly keep evolving.
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