Drag the green ion - An interactive online quantitative cellular biology learning module

The goal of bioengineering education is the marriage of quantitative engineering with traditional descriptive biology. The successful merging of these two disciplines at the undergraduate level has been hampered by the limited availability of appropriate curricular materials and educational resources. Few resources have been developed to aide instructors in teaching and illustrating concepts that lie at the interface of biology and engineering. The web-based tools currently available to engineering students for learning introductory cellular biology suffer from two major problems. The first is that the majority of engineering students are classified as learning new information most effectively through visual representations such as pictures and animations, yet most current instruction still relies heavily on textual description of phenomenon. The second problem is that many existing web-based tools are passive one-way instructors, showing information, but failing to engage students in higher-level critical thinking. There is no interactive component to the instruction. Many of the available tools that are labeled as interactive still use almost exclusively passive instruction. Due in part to the rapid advancement of technology in recent years, the ability to develop educational units that are both visually stimulating, fully interactive and scientifically accurate is more feasible than ever. This paper discusses the design, development, and assessment of an online learning module aimed at educating undergraduate engineering students about the quantitative aspects of ion transport in cells.