About the Author

Hello. My name is Richard Crang. I'm a professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus, and I'd like to tell you a bit about how we have developed our course in Plant Anatomy-- from a very traditional kind of an approach that really hadn't changed much over the course of twenty, thirty years or more -- into a course that has made extensive use of educational technologies. And as we move along I'll try to point out to you some of the ways in which I feel that we're trying to take the best advantage pedagogically of both the technology and some of the traditional ways of instruction as well. To make these changes and to get the course to where we are today I've been fortunate to have several undergraduate students working with me. Picture 1 (62.0K) Picture 2 (28.0K) Picture 3 (25.0K) Our course is taught in a building that is over a century old. Traditionally, each student worked independently with prepared slides and preserved materials. We now have converted images from those specimens into electronic format and have the students use their lab time making preparations-- mostly from fresh specimens. This gives them the opportunity to develop new technical skills as well as a much better feel for plant anatomy. Sometimes students may work in pairs, but in order for the entire class to participate they can capture images of their preparations with the video camera and microscope coupled with a networked computer. The results are then posted on the web each week at the course website. Picture 4 (43.0K) We wanted to meet the laboratory objectives while at the same time develop material that would normally be covered in lecture for a regular face-to-face class. So we took additional text materials, we took a variety of illustrations, and added descriptive content to them. We came up with animated gifs. We came up also with a series of four to six-minute videos that express particular points of interest, and we rolled all this material together into a CD. We did this in cooperation with several other individuals at both the University as well as other sites, the most notably our main collaborator has been Dr. Andrey Vassilyev from the Komarov Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. Richard Crang has been involved with research and teaching in the areas of microscopy and plant anatomy for over 30 years. He is currently concentrating on the microscopic analysis of lichens under environmental stress from air pollution. Recently, Richard has been a faculty fellow in conjunction with the U of I Online Office working with the UI@Chicago Health Professions online course initiative at Chicago. He has developed several online courses in plant biology at UI@Urbana-Champaign. He has spent the last several summers conducting research and providing guest lectures at the City University of New York, Herbert H. Lehman College in the Bronx. He is starting an active retirement to carry out the development of educational materials and to pursue interests in plant anatomy. Andrey Vassilyev started his advanced studies in Russia in the field of forestry, and for nearly 40 years has been an active scientist in the Laboratory of Plant Anatomy & Morphology at the Komarov Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia. His interests in the anatomy of plants are broad, but he has specialized in the anatomy of secretary structures, and is still active in this field. He has held a joint position with the Komarov as lead scientist and as professor of plant biology at St. Petersburg State University. He is the author or co-author of several texts on plant biology, morphology and anatomy. Dr. Vassilyev has been a long-time associate editor of Botanische Journal in Russia and is widely known for his work in the fine structure of plants.