Hey UCF medical students, instead of lugging around a heavy textbook, how about pulling the contents up on your phone? There’s an app for that.
Renal Physiology, a digital textbook application created by Dr. Jonathan Kibble, an associate professor of physiology at UCF, launched on April 19 as a less-expensive, high-tech alternative.
The launch is the culmination of a project started two years ago by Kibble and David Rogers, founder and CEO of Allogy Interactive, the Orlando-based mobile application developer.
“The idea was to explore what a next-generation textbook is really going to be,” Rogers said. “We wanted to step beyond simply displaying the content in a new media to doing something more powerful.”
The Renal Physiology app gives students the opportunity to have learning materials with them all the time. It is also designed with a coaching system to organize daily learning and self-assessment.
“There is something special about having your personal things, like entertainment and social networking, all in one place,” Kibble said. “Why not your class materials too?”
This idea allows people to see the inner workings of the kidneys through their iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.
This app, an interactive version of part of Kibble’s textbook, The Big Picture: Medical Physiology, is just the first in a series about physiology, according to UCF News and Information.
The material was reformatted, and some new writing was done to create features like terminology, quizzes and clinical correlations, Kibble said.
The app will save students cash and aggravation.
“It saves students a ton of money and keeps their backpacks as light as their phone or tablet,” Colin Forward, communications director for Allogy, said.
Not only is it beneficial to medical students, but it can also be a valuable tool for instructors. It is a tool that can enable instructors to monitor their students’ progress.
“It also coaches students all the way through the learning process, even providing reminders for important dates associated with the material, like exams,” Forward said.
After spending some time figuring out what will best help students understand and retain information, the team at Allogy took the content provided by Kibble and worked closely with him to determine the proper methods for displaying graphics, administering quizzes and coaching students through their studies.
“We start with development of a mobile application framework, and then add in the content, test it and find ways to improve the application,” Rogers said. “It is a constant cycle.”
Allogy has built apps for hospitals, nonprofit organizations working overseas and even the federal government. They are currently working on a project right now that is a next-generation mobile electronic health record, Rogers said.
As of now, all the apps created by Allogy are geared toward the medical field, but they have the tools and capability to create apps for any program at UCF. If any teacher or department wants to create their own digital textbook, Allogy can help them through the whole process, Rogers said.
“Our goal is to make textbooks more affordable, and that starts with the subject-matter experts,” Rogers said.
The app is now available for $9.99 from the Apple App Store.