The MacCycle: an extensible multimedia for teaching the physiology and histology of the menstrual cycle

Abstract

The development of MacCycle, a multimedia visual database of the female menstrual cycle, stemmed from two related events. First, the School of Biological and Medical Sciences at St Andrews University began to make contingency plans to update a computer classroom which had been used to teach physiology for about five years. Second, staff retirements were about to change the profile of the School′s teaching coverage in the key area of preclinical medicine. We anticipated that the introduction of a more flexible delivery system for the histology course might go some way to offsetting potential staff shortages.