The project:
DigitalMarine is a strategic partnership co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, uniting 6 universities with the aim of developing an online platform dedicated to the use of marine organisms in life sciences.
The platform contains different learning resources adapted to a self-guided learning experience for master students in order to promote active learning approaches, such as blended learning, and innovative teaching methods, such as the flipped classroom.
This online platform is associated with a marine biology course, the Schmid Training Course, that takes place in a marine station. Students take on practical lab work as well as conceptual questioning about research performed on marine organisms. Thanks to the platform that allows students to learn at their own rhythm beforehand, more time is available for hands-on work, questions, and discussions with researchers and other students during the in-person learning component at the marine station. A broad range of organisms is presented in this platform: acoels, amphioxus, annelids, bacteria, brown algae, chondrichthyans, cnidarians, crustaceans, echinoderms, placozoans, sponges, and tunicates. Furthermore, the course is not limited to one specific field of biology but explores a variety of disciplines: evolution, life cycle, tissue regeneration, neurobiology, cell biology, cellular morphology, and marine biotechnology.
The platform is intended for use primarily by Master’s students, but as an open-access resource it is available to anyone wishing to learn about these organisms. It may be of particular interest for PhD students, academics, or individuals working in “blue economy” industries.
The consortium has also published a handbook of marine model organisms, which contains 500 pages and focuses on the same disciplinary field as this platform. With its 24 chapters on 24 different marine organisms, this handbook is one of the most comprehensive ones on this thematic. It is available in Open Access here.
This project follows previous initiatives related to the development of blended learning in marine stations at Sorbonne Université such as e-marin'lab.
Partners in the DigitalMarine project: Sorbonne Université (Paris, France – coordinator), Tierärztlich Hochschule Hannover (Germany), Université de Fribourg (Switzerland), Università del Salento (Lecce, Italy), Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (Naples, Italy), The Australian National University (Canberra, Australia)
The DigitalMarine design team:
The videos, animations, and illustrations that make up the learning content of the various modules are the result of a collaboration between the DigitalMarine design team and the researchers teaching in the Schimd Training Course. The design team is composed of Haley Flom, an educational engineer, and David Wahnoun, a graphic designer/digital integrator.
Haley co-developed the online learning modules with the Schmid Training Course teaching staff. She can be contacted via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haleycflom/
David created the original media for the DigitalMarine modules found on the website (videos, animations, graphic design, web). He also administrated the DigitalMarine website and Moodle server during the project.
We would like to thank the Service Informatique of the Obsérvatoire Océanologique de Banyuls-sur-Mer for their tireless assistance with the technical aspects of this project, as well as the DigitalMarine directors Raphaël Lami, Yves Desdevises, and Agnès Boutet for their guidance and expertise.