Abstract

Students always encounter difficulties in studying biochemical pathways. They are especially weak in understanding the relationships between metabolic pathways and their integration because these pathways are always taught one by one in class. The Metabolism Metro is a self-learning tool which aims to arouse students’ interest in exploring human metabolic pathways. We have finished the first two phases of the courseware with satisfactory feedback, including Phase 1: L-aminolegoland (urea cycle) and Phase 2: AG City (nucleotide metabolism).

Before we moved on to design our next courseware, feedback were collected from students in order to understand the users’ experience. In conventional courseware development, teachers always play a major role in the courseware content design. In this project (Phase 3: Sweetieland), besides inviting a student helper (who has knowledge about the area) to work with the teacher as a team to design the courseware in a student perspective, we also collected suggestions of previous phases from the end-users. New components would be considered to add in this project according to their comments such that this courseware was designed according to the needs of the end-users.

This teacher-student co-working project is a novel idea that adopts a student-centered approach so that students can participate actively in the design of the courseware. Through exchanging ideas with students, the teacher can have a better understanding of the difficulties that students might encounter in their studies, and can design a learning tool that is most suitable for them. This interactive self-learning tool will be packaged as a courseware using the Articulate Storyline eLearning authoring software.