20 About This Project
Who
The author and project team are responsible for adding and updating the About This Project section.
How
- Present a high-level overview of content and audience
- Describe the creation process, including details of the review or revision process
- Include a brief bio for the lead author or project manager
- Other sections can be added applicable (e.g., “How to Use This Book”)
Example
The example below is from The Human Anatomy Lab Manual.
OVERVIEW
This is a lab manual for a college-level human anatomy course (BIOL 3446 at UTA). Despite the abundance of information readily available via Google, the mastery of anatomy requires a fair amount of memorization for quick recall. The activities in this manual encourage students to engage with new vocabulary in many ways, including grouping key terms, matching terms to structures, recalling definitions, and written exercises.
As the majority of college campuses do not have easy access to a cadaver, most of the activities in this manual utilize anatomical models. Also included are several dissections of animal tissues, and a significant amount of histological examinations.
Each unit includes both pre- and post-lab questions and six lab exercises designed for a classroom where students move from station to station during a three-hour period. Effort was put into equalizing the time required to perform each lab exercise, to facilitate class flow. The vocabulary terms used in each unit are listed at the end of the manual and serve as a checklist for practicals.
CREATION PROCESS
When Malgosia Wilk-Blaszczak began teaching human anatomy at UTA she realized that while there are many commercially available manuals which incorporate a lot of human physiology, none of them focus solely on anatomy. She decided to create a manual for anatomy labs that could fill that void. The first version of this work was created and used in anatomy labs at UTA.
The idea of publishing the lab manual as an OER came to her courtesy of Michelle Reed, Open Education Librarian at UTA. To make this leap to an open platform, she enlisted the help of some of her best students. In Fall 2017, one year prior to the publication of this work, Wilk recruited a group of three excellent undergraduate teaching assistants. These students worked with UTA Libraries to identify openly licensed images and incorporate them into the text. Libraries’ staff assisted in migrating the resource to Pressbooks, where it could be easily exported into a variety of formats. Furthermore, we conducted student surveys to gather feedback. Wilk’s teaching assistants have always been an important part of her pedagogy. With their assistance, she was able to complete and openly publish this anatomy lab manual. The students put in the hard work to change all illustrations to Creative Commons licensed images and ensure proper attribution of all the images used. The student contributors, Kevin Alford, Andrea Campo-Velez, and Victoria Dorch, now alumni,