Virtual Diagnosis in the Classroom
As most may know, I’ve done a lot of research into people who are leveraging virtual reality as both a tool to teach medical diagnostics in a safe and controlled setting, and as a medium through which we can better understand psychological disorders and even develop treatment methods that are less stressful for the patient because they’re executed in a virtual world.? Clearly, this is an emerging and popular field, because in the December 12th edition of the Chronicle for Higher Education (p. A6), I read about yet another instance where virtual reality is being applied as a teaching tool for students.
Yumi, just one of the patients that students will get to meet as part of the MyCaseSpace program, presents with symptoms of a headache that keeps her up at night and is not alleviated by the usual pain medications such as Tylenol and aspirin. Students are given the opportunity to chat with Yumi (or any of a number of other virtual patients), order tests, make a diagnosis, and provide treatment. The outcome can vary depending on the decisions the students make, but the grades they receive are based on their decision making abilities. They can chose to retake portions of the case for better scores, and they can see how other students handled the case. Ultimately, there is an opportunity to collaborate with other students (an option critical in real-life diagnoses) and discuss different approaches to the case.
David Segal is the creator of MyCaseSpace and an assistant professor in the College of Health and Public Affairs at the University of Central Florida. He has created his characters to be as realistic as possible in order to keep students more engaged with the program. According to the article, he approaches the development of the program much like a video game, trying to provide students choices within the parameters of the environment to achieve some end result, which can be either positive or negative depending on the choices made. One potential drawback, and what makes it different from virtual worlds such as Second Life, is that there are no people behind these virtual patients; they exist only as several thousand lines of code and will not adapt beyond those parameters.
Though this could be viewed as a setup with a potentially rigid path for students to follow, it benefits professors too. Mr. Segal is using the program to teach nearly 800 pharmacy and pathophysiology students in four classes, two online and two in person. Each student is assigned 15 cases, which means that Mr. Segal would have 12,000 cases to grade. MyCaseSpace tracks each student as he or she navigates through the program and records how long each student is spending analyzing the case. By the end of the semester, the application is able to report much of what the professor needs to know in order to give a fair grade.
Segal plans to grow the program to other universities and professors, perhaps employing an iTunes-like interface to allow faculty to select the cases they’d like to use for their courses. Segal will open his own cases for purchase first, but will also provide opportunities to customize cases or even create completely new cases from scratch. The latter could be time consuming, but would only have to be done once before serving hundreds of students.
I’ve always been interested in applying new and interesting technologies to medicine, and I do think there is some value in engaging students at both the visual and auditory levels. The article highlights those who argue that there is no proof that learning using virtual reality is any more effective than traditional methods, but proof notwithstanding, I know that I generally am better able to absorb information when it involves more than just one of my senses.
On the other hand, it is nice to have the human interaction every once in a while, and there is a danger, as we lean more on these virtual worlds, that we will become so absorbed that our social structure will change. Just look at what Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn have done to the way people socialize; would a virtual component draw people in even more?
What do you think?
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