CLEVELAND, Ohio - Students in Cuyahoga Community Colleges hugely popular anatomy and physiology classes will soon have access to a sleek new 3-D teaching tool developed by their own professors and e-learning experts. The program, called the Tri-C 3-D Stress Simulator, is designed to help students learn complex physiology through 3-D simulation.

The teaching tool is the result of a yearlong collaboration between three biology professors and the schools Office of eLearning and Innovation, which funded the project with $80,000 from its annual budget earmarked for interactive learning.

It takes about 12 to 15 hours to complete, and allows students to navigate through simulations of the stress response at the whole body and cellular level at their own pace, while they answer questions on the subject material and watch animations.

Were basically flying through the material trying to get everything in thats required by the curriculum, said Christopher Caprette, assistant professor of biology at Tri-C and one of the developers of the simulation. What weve learned is that every student has their own learning style, every faculty member has their own teaching style, and these dont always match. So any additional way of presenting the material is a good thing.

The anatomy and physiology (A & P) classes were targeted because they are the highest enrollment classes at Tri-C, with about 1,500 students per term signed up for two levels of courses. The classes are pre-requisites for many of the health and medicine career tracks the college offers, including nursing, physician assistant, occupational therapy and others.

A poll of students in December of 2012 also revealed that A & P was one area where students felt they could use the most extra help, said Cynthia Conaway-Mavroidis, assistant professor of biology at Tri-C and co-developer of the simulation. Assistant professor Anne Marie Yunker also helped develop the program.

Three of the schools A & P classes are currently using the simulation during a pilot of the software, Conaway-Mavroidis said. One course used it in the fall in both campus-based and online courses.

The team chose to model the bodys stress response because it involves several body systems interacting simultaneously, Caprette said.

They can then see how things sort of integrate into a whole system, he said. Thats something thats pretty hard to get across.

I think the one overwhelming comment was that [the simulation] really helped them understand the topic better, Conaway-Mavroidis said. Several of my students have said it would be helpful to use a little of this after every topic covered in class.

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Tri-C develops 3-D simulation to help teach biology students complex physiology of stress