A new database of open-source physiology illustrations is now available that reflects the diverse population of students in Canadian universities, thanks to the work of a Western professor and graduate.
Traditional teaching images from textbooks and other sources can be expensive and do not allow instructors to modify the images for their lessons, so physiology and pharmacology professor Anita Woods and Western alum Priya Modi decided to try to find a solution.
“These images are royalty-free and downloadable,” said Woods. “Everything will come as a PowerPoint slide set with multiple layers, so an instructor can choose what they show to match their lesson and what level they’re teaching at – it just includes attribution to the artist.”
Aside from making the images easy to adjust, the team also incorporated diversity into the illustrations, making them more representative of who’s in the classroom and helping students feel welcome and accepted.
Modi, BMSc’23, led the work, developing it as an open educational resource (OER), Physiology Diversified.
“The goal is to make the visuals more diverse, equitable and inclusive in a way that speaks to a broad majority of people and resonates with a student audience. I also wanted to ensure the website itself is easy to use, user friendly and accessible,” said Modi, who created both the images and the online platform that would make them easily accessible as part of her master’s in biomedical communications at the University of Toronto.
The illustrations can help students better understand the factors contributing to human physiology and disease, showing diverse individuals who are both healthy and sick.
“Race and diversity can affect the outcome of what you’re teaching. For example, skin rash presentations of adverse drug reactions can be very different based on the tone of the skin,” Woods said.
To create the images, Modi looked first at the demographic affected by a specific disease, then at who was underrepresented in existing materials to incorporate diversity in areas like gender, age, size and ability.
“When you go into the real world and see so much patient diversity, you don’t necessarily see what’s depicted in the commercial textbooks. It also benefits the student sitting in the classroom to know and understand there’s a lot of diversity that exists,” Modi said.
