 Dr. KuoYuan Hwa
Associate Professor, Dept. of Molecular Science
Director, Center for Biomedical Industry National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan
-
| Dr. Hwa is the director of the Center for Biomedical Industries and an associate professor at the National Taipei University of Technology. She is also an adjunct Professor at the Augusta University, Georgia, USA. She graduated and received her Ph. D. from the School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University at the age of 29. At Professor Paul T. Englund’s lab of JHU, Dr. Hwa isolated N-linked glycosylation mutants of Trypanosoma brucei, the first characterized genetic mutants of the parasites. The work was orally presented at the Gordon conference for glycobiology. After completed her post-doc training at Academia Sinica, Dr. Hwa had joined the Cathay Medical Research Institute as the director for the laboratory of human genetics, developing a clinical technology for prenatal screening. |
Having a proper education environments is a challenge for tribal children living in the remote areas of Taiwan. Moreover, lacking teachers and technological resources are common problems in these areas. To solve these problems, an e-learning platform based on the cloud computing technology has been established. Our goals are 1) to test if cultural content could be added into a health science classes and 2) if an effective e-learning platform can be developed for indigenous children. To evaluate the effectiveness of our platform, an on-line assessment were imbedded in the system. And, students have to answer the same assessment questions before and after the classes. The culturally inclusive content were also tested off-line for its effectiveness. And, validation of the assessment questions has been conducted. Another key factor for designing the e-platform is that the brain learning theory is used to design our e-learning platform which has a central theme established by several relative sub-sections, and repeat learning processes are imbedded by a short summary after each section. As a summary, our results suggest that the culturally inclusive content is effective and the cloud computing educational platform based on the brain learning theory is an effective solution in developing the e-learning platform. This is the first effective e-learning platform for the health science education deployed in Taiwan indigenous schools. Also, for teachers, our platform can show the learning process for an individual student or for the sub-groups in the class. This can be used by the teachers to establish the pedagogy of the course. In the future, our approach can also be applicable for other subjects such as English, physical science and so on.