Kasparinsky Laboratory
High-quality DVD–video and additional multimedia technologies will help students and postgraduates to better assimilate the material, and everyone interested will get acquainted with what is taught at the MSU biofactory. The project, launched by enthusiasts back in 2001, predicts a great future.
It is difficult to surprise someone with videos today, but it is possible. For example, if you prepare a presentation of a thesis not in PowerPoint, but in 3D Studio Max and instead of slides show the audience a full-fledged movie with three-dimensional graphics. A year ago, such a film was watched in one breath by members of the attestation commission and teachers during the defense of a thesis at the Department of Physiology of Microorganisms of the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University. A successfully defended former student visualizes the material already for a PhD thesis.
The videos are also prepared by the teachers of the biofac. Since 2001, a group of employees of the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University has been videotaping lectures, speeches at conferences and in lecture halls. Today, this hobby has grown into the project "DVD series as multimedia interactive educational resources", and the employees have united in the multimedia technology laboratory, headed by Felix Kasparinsky.
Experimenting with materials from more than 500 lectures from 15 lecture courses, public readings and conferences, the laboratory staff determined the most productive ways to use multimedia interactive resources for educational purposes. The first practical testing of the training video took place in 2007, at the suggestion of the Physiology Section of the Department of Biological Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences for Physiological Sciences and the I.P. Pavlov Physiological Society at the Russian Academy of Sciences. At the same time, the work of the Kasparinsky laboratory was supported by a grant within the framework of the priority national project "Education" and its employees were able to implement the first project.
The DVD series "Modern course of lectures on Classical Physiology" consists of 12 discs with lectures by famous physiologists of Russia, the highest authorities in their field, who were invited specially for filming from eight research institutes, universities and medical academies from four cities of Russia.
The course has several features. Firstly, he presents lectures on each of the sections of physiology, and they are arranged in the way that students of medical universities and biological faculties of classical universities study these sections within the framework of a standard curriculum.
Secondly, an appendix of three thematically complementary lectures was published for the main series, delivered by leading physiologists of the MSU biofac for different audiences: students of preparatory courses, students of the general course and a special course in physiology.
Finally, this is a well–done job - the quality of the recording allows you to consider all the subtleties of experiments, to hear all the sounds. Thanks to the special semantic labels and the logical arrangement of time points, the viewer can not only scroll the film backwards or forwards, but also quickly move on to a new topic of the lecture or to a certain part of it. All films are subtitled, and working with the viewer interface does not require any special skills from the user.
"Discs with lectures published in the laboratory were distributed to many physiological libraries," says Felix Kasparinsky. – They were also used by the GEOTAR-Media publishing group to publish an illustrated book of lectures. They are in demand by metropolitan and regional teachers, students, applicants, and everyone who wants to broaden their horizons."
It is expected that the cost of one disc with a lecture will be about 200 rubles. It is worth adding that the discs, which are quite affordable, are equipped with a decent copy protection system, so they may not appear on Youtube soon. Wise teachers have taken care of the protection of copyright and related rights in advance, but there is also an element of training in this: the fee, albeit modest, is evidence of respect for someone else's work and recognition of the quality of the product.
Today, everyone recognizes that multimedia technologies improve not only the digestibility of educational materials, but also the attitude to the subject. Many foreign scientists post their lectures on the Internet, Walter Levin, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has become a real Youtube star, huge archives of video materials for students can often be found on the websites of leading universities, everything is distributed for free, just study. In most cases, this is done not within the framework of multimillion–dollar state programs, but on the enthusiasm and interest of the teachers themselves - probably this is the main thing that Russian education lacks today. Multimedia educational materials in Russian are still very rare. You can find videos on physics on the web, but they are, unfortunately, quite fragmentary. The MIPT staff is trying to fix the situation, they are preparing translations of about 1800 lectures that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has posted online. It is hoped that the translations, as well as the lectures themselves, will be available for free. In addition, MIPT plans to release its lecture collection on DVD.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru02.07.2008