Division of Educational Informatics, New York University School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA.
BMC Med Educ. 2011 Jan 26;11:4. doi: 10.1186/1472-6920-11-4.
Curricular reform efforts and a desire to use novel educational strategies that foster student collaboration are challenging the traditional microscope-based teaching of histology. Computer-based histology teaching tools and Virtual Microscopes (VM), computer-based digital slide viewers, have been shown to be effective and efficient educational strategies. We developed an open-source VM system based on the Google Maps engine to transform our histology education and introduce new teaching methods. This VM allows students and faculty to collaboratively create content, annotate slides with markers, and it is enhanced with social networking features to give the community of learners more control over the system.
We currently have 1,037 slides in our VM system comprised of 39,386,941 individual JPEG files that take up 349 gigabytes of server storage space. Of those slides 682 are for general teaching and available to our students and the public; the remaining 355 slides are used for practical exams and have restricted access. The system has seen extensive use with 289,352 unique slide views to date. Students viewed an average of 56.3 slides per month during the histology course and accessed the system at all hours of the day. Of the 621 annotations added to 126 slides 26.2% were added by faculty and 73.8% by students. The use of the VM system reduced the amount of time faculty spent administering the course by 210 hours, but did not reduce the number of laboratory sessions or the number of required faculty. Laboratory sessions were reduced from three hours to two hours each due to the efficiencies in the workflow of the VM system.
Our virtual microscope system has been an effective solution to the challenges facing traditional histopathology laboratories and the novel needs of our revised curriculum. The web-based system allowed us to empower learners to have greater control over their content, as well as the ability to work together in collaborative groups. The VM system saved faculty time and there was no significant difference in student performance on an identical practical exam before and after its adoption. We have made the source code of our VM freely available and encourage use of the publically available slides on our website.
课程改革的努力和使用新颖的教育策略来促进学生合作的愿望正在挑战传统的基于显微镜的组织学教学。基于计算机的组织学教学工具和虚拟显微镜 (VM)，即基于计算机的数字幻灯片查看器，已被证明是有效的和高效的教育策略。我们开发了一个基于 Google Maps 引擎的开源 VM 系统，以转变我们的组织学教育并引入新的教学方法。这个 VM 允许学生和教师共同创建内容，用标记注释幻灯片，并且具有社交网络功能，可以增强学习者对系统的控制。
我们目前在我们的 VM 系统中有 1037 张幻灯片，由 39386941 张单独的 JPEG 文件组成，占用 349GB 的服务器存储空间。其中 682 张幻灯片用于一般教学，可供我们的学生和公众使用；其余 355 张幻灯片用于实践考试，访问受限。迄今为止，该系统已被广泛使用，有 289352 次独特的幻灯片视图。学生在组织学课程期间平均每月查看 56.3 张幻灯片，并在一天中的任何时间访问系统。在 126 张幻灯片上添加了 621 个注释，其中 26.2%是教师添加的，73.8%是学生添加的。VM 系统的使用减少了教师管理课程的时间 210 小时，但并没有减少实验室课程的数量或所需教师的数量。由于 VM 系统工作流程的效率提高，实验室课程从每三小时减少到每两小时。
我们的虚拟显微镜系统是解决传统组织病理学实验室面临的挑战和我们修订后的课程的新需求的有效解决方案。基于网络的系统使学习者能够更好地控制自己的内容，并能够在协作小组中共同工作。VM 系统为教师节省了时间，并且在采用它之前和之后，学生在相同的实践考试中的表现没有显著差异。我们已经免费提供了我们的 VM 的源代码，并鼓励在我们的网站上使用公共可用的幻灯片。
