It is known that a picture is worth more than thousand words, what value can a collection of 1000 images that show the most recent advances in biology?
On January 24, the website BPoD.cat http://www.bpod.cat will reach the 1000 pictures published. This website is the main objective of an educational innovation project that aims to bring to the society the recent advances in Biology, mainly applied to the field of Biomedicine. It comes to fill a gap in the world of information and scientific dissemination, in matters that all of us may be interested in; either out of curiosity or out of necessity, and that has an important role as a complement to teaching tasks for the pre-university levels, but also to those of the university.
This project emerged at the end of 2015 thanks to the participation and enthusiasm of a small group of students of Grade in Biology (Marcos Morales, Vicent Arnau, Guillermo Soriano, Yolanda Sánchez, Natàlia Claramonte, José Aparici, Joan Pons, Sara Micó, Carla Perpiñá, Anna Teruel, Borja Ferrero, Eduardo Gómez and Meritxell Pérez) who, under the direction of professors Josema Torres and Xavier Ponsoda, put the first pieces of what we can now see on the web. Later, Professor Rafi Domínguez joined the group, and the initial group of students has become a group of about 60 students. A working system has been established through which, each day, they translate and publish a comment or explanation related to a recent discovery. This website is an authorized mirror of that of the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences http://bpod.mrc.ac.uk that selects the images and writes the original comment.
Due to the system of collaborative work and its objectives (that the participants can learn one thing each day and that helps the society as a whole but mainly the students), it became a Learning and Service project; which was endorsed by the program of Projects of Educational Innovation and Improvement of the Teaching Quality Service of the Universitat de València for the course 2015-16, and in its subsequent editions 2016-17 and 2017-18. The team works, not only to keep the web up to date, but also to get the whole collection of spectacular photos that, since 2012, are being published on the original website. For now you can see photos published since May 1, 2015. Both the original website and the translated one contain links to glossaries, of some selected terms, thus increasing its pedagogical and informative value. In our case, they are linked to the glossary that belongs to the bioApS project http://bioaps.uv.es, another learning-service project of the Universitat de València.
It should be noted that this project was awarded the 2016 Ragalo Prize, for the best learning-service project in the Health Sciences category http://links.uv.es/qnQ08Mx.
