UCL pioneers virtual educational resources for bioscience

UCL staff and students have helped to create an online teaching and learning resource designed to accompany and enhance undergraduate degrees in biosciences. VERB (virtual educational resource for the bioscience) contains a series of 'web books? outlining the diversity of the animal kingdom from an evolutionary perspective, plus an associated glossary with hyperlinked entries. VERB focuses on phylogeny (evolutionary history) and functional anatomy, but touches on many other subjects, including genetics, ecology, physiology, development and cell biology. The resource, which makes extensive use of the collections in the Grant Museum of Zoology, doubles as a revision tool - students have constant access, allowing them to browse by taxon, undertake mock quizzes to test their knowledge and gain feedback. Project leader Helen Chatterjee (UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment) and her team are working with the Higher Education Academy Centre for Bioscience to develop open educational resources that are readily accessible to the wider biosciences community. The project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Joint Information Systems Committee, will allow other institutions to use, modify and reuse content on the condition that they, in turn, recycle it back into the community. Sharing should reduce the number of institutions producing the same resource, promote a more collaborative approach and, ultimately, produce high quality resources for university-level teaching in a manner that is both time and cost effective.