Hillsborough Community College

Ybor City Campus

Dr. Susan Miletta, Professor of Biology

Online Review Labs for HCC

We are a small campus, specializing in the arts.

We have only two science labs, but hundreds of sections/students! We have four full-time and numerous adjunct instructors: the labs are always full!

There are no available times for students to review beyond their scheduled lab period.

We needed a way to provide lab review opportunities in a “portable” format.

There were not enough supplies to let everybody sign-out their own specimens for home review!

Additionally, anything available for out-of-lab-review did not necessarily match our materials – the beautiful photographs and micrographs in lab manuals don’t cover everything; ex: sheep’s vs. human heart:

Sheep’s Heart Human Heart

“Computer Bob” “Computer Mike”

My two computer buddies, Professor Bob Schatzow and Professor Mike Rabaut, suggested a solution!

They said we could make an interactive review program with photographs and micrographs of our own lab specimens.

We had no budget, no equipment, no software, and no IT department – we were in the dark ages of the 20th century!

So the guys got a new-fangled invention called a digital camera and built an attachment to hook it up to a microscope.

This was our project workspace

Project workspace in 2012!

I started taking micrographs of our lab slides, and photographs of the skeletons, dissection specimens, etc. The guys hunted up free-ware and share-ware and I image-mapped the graphics and produced sound files for the key essay terms.

First came the 20th century “labs on a CD Rom”.

Later the college purchased a digital camera microscope for us!

As the 20th century drew to a close, the guys upgraded the project to “online files” and we stopped printing CD’s. Then came the 21st century with “everything interactive online”.

The college got an IT department, new servers, and a software budget.

Computer Bob died and Computer Mike moved on to other projects, leaving me to the new IT department. IT is a patient bunch, but they will not miss me and my hours of computer problems when I retire in October

Come see our materials at:

http://www.hccfl.edu/yc/science.aspx