UD’s virtual microscope draws national audience

3:13 p.m., April 29, 2004--Learning to use a microscope now is easier, thanks to a virtual microscope available on the UD web at [www.udel.edu/Biology/ketcham/microscope/#1]. UD students have had access to the virtual scope for more than a year, but almost 4,000 users nationwide have clicked to it since it was featured on a lab instructors’ listserv, in an education journal and on the New Media Center’s technology web site.

The virtual microscope and an accompanying video showing how to use a microscope had their roots in Robert Ketcham’s frustration.

Ketcham, lab coordinator for biological sciences, said he once tested biology majors after an entire semester of lab instruction and found only about one-quarter of them were proficient at using the microscope’s trickier controls.

For a long while, he just stopped using microscopes in labs for nonmajors, but last spring he and multimedia developer Becky Kinney came up with an online answer for the problem.

Lab instructors from many other colleges clicked onto the virtual microscope at UD and the instructional video and promptly called Ketchum to ensure it would still be posted if they started recommending it to students. The microscope tutorial, which Kinney fashioned in Flash Multimedia, features a helpful explanatory introduction and a checklist of learning steps.

A review published in Cell Biology Education said, “In a world full of electronic gadgets and widgets of all kinds, many students fail to grasp the fundamentals of operating a standard optical light microscope. Robert Ketcham and Becky Kinney of the university of Delaware have developed an interactive web program that allows students to practice using a microscope over the InternetŠ.Although this site is still a work in progress, it has great value in preparing a student for the first microscopy lab. It is both a fun site to visit and a perfect place to start practicing good microscopy habits.’’

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