About
The new joint department of biomedical engineering at UT creates the immediate need for long distance education and exchange of complementary expertise across multiple campuses, hospitals and medical centers between Austin and Houston. For medical devices technologies, the conventional classroom instruction cost about $200 an hour. We estimate that the interactive web-based training costs about one third of that. What’s more, training via the web can serve instruction globally – no seat restrictions, around the clock, and without travel costs. However, distance learners also face the unique challenge of studying without the traditional structure of lecture rooms. We started the development of an interactive and animated website to describe and teach scaling effects across multiple physical disciplines with focus on Micro and Nano biomedical device physics and applications. In addition to lecture notes and power point slide shows, the site features the multimedia presentations and videos of principles of micro and nano devices, materials and processes over disparate time and length scales. Through the modular “knowledge nodes”, we expect to help the undergraduate students and the general public better understand why, in some cases, it makes sense to miniaturize a device for reasons beyond economics, volume, and weight.
There are two parts in the project. Part I: we will deal with the development of enhanced web-based visual learning portal using Flash animation, video streaming and audio/text annotations). Part II: we will select representative research projects, and present them online using JavaScript 3D tools.
We expect this academic development proposal to greatly enhance this inter-institutional teaching effort to cover broad applications using nanotechnologies for imaging and therapy in medicines. The technological platform will be readily extendable to other engineering classes in the broad areas of advanced material, product design and fabrication at disparate scales, and multiscale simulations.