The LINDSAY Virtual Human Project: an immersive approach to anatomy and physiology.

The increasing number of digital anatomy teaching software packages challenges anatomy educators on how to best integrate these tools for teaching and learning. Realistically, there exists a complex interplay of design, implementation, politics, and learning needs in the development and integration of software for education, each of which may be further amplified by the somewhat siloed roles of programmers, faculty, and students. LINDSAY Presenter is newly designed software that permits faculty and students to model and manipulate three-dimensional anatomy presentations and images, while including embedded quizzes, links, and text-based content. A validated tool measuring impact across pedagogy, resources, interactivity, freedom, granularity, and factors outside the immediate learning event was used in conjunction with observation, field notes, and focus groups to critically examine the impact of attitudes and perceptions of all stakeholders in the early implementation of LINDSAY Presenter before and after a three-week trial period with the software. Results demonstrate that external, personal media usage, along with students' awareness of the need to apply anatomy to clinical professional situations drove expectations of LINDSAY Presenter. A focus on the software over learning, which can be expected during initial orientation, surprisingly remained after three weeks of use. The time-intensive investment required to create learning content is a detractor from user-generated content and may reflect the consumption nature of other forms of digital learning. Early excitement over new technologies needs to be tempered with clear understanding of what learning is afforded, and how these constructively support future application and integration into professional practice.

Podcasting in medical education: can we turn this toy into an effective learning tool?

Advances in information technology have changed how we deliver medical education, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Technologies that were designed for purposes other than education, such as podcasting, are now frequently used in medical education. In this article, the authors discuss the pros and cons of adapting existing technologies for medical education, caution against limiting evaluation of technologies to the level of rater satisfaction, and suggest a research agenda for formally evaluating the role of existing and future technologies in medical education.

Simulation training improves diagnostic performance on a real patient with similar clinical findings.

BACKGROUND: Training on a cardiopulmonary simulator improves subsequent diagnostic performance on the same simulator. But data are lacking on transfer of learning. The objective of this study was to determine whether training on a cardiorespiratory simulator improves diagnostic performance on a real patient. METHODS: We randomly allocated first-year medical students at the University of Calgary to simulator training in one of three clinical scenarios of acute-onset chest pain: pulmonary embolism with right ventricular strain but no murmur, symptomatic aortic stenosis, or myocardial ischemia causing mitral regurgitation. Simulation sessions ran for 20 min, after which participants had a standardized debriefing session and reviewed the physical findings. Immediately following the training sessions, students assessed the auscultatory findings of a real patient with mitral regurgitation. Our outcome measures were accuracy of identifying abnormal auscultatory findings and diagnosing the underlying cardiac abnormality (mitral regurgitation). RESULTS: Eighty-six students participated in the study. Students trained on mitral regurgitation were more likely to identify and diagnose these findings on a real patient with mitral regurgitation than those who had trained on aortic stenosis or a scenario with no cardiac murmur. The accuracy (SD) of identifying clinical features of mitral regurgitation for these three groups was 74.0 (36.4) vs 56.2 (34.3) vs 36.8 (33.1), respectively (P = .0005), and for diagnosing mitral regurgitation, the accuracy was 68.0 (45.4) vs 51.6 (50.0) vs 29.9 (40.7), respectively (P = .01). CONCLUSIONS: Simulator training on mitral regurgitation increases the likelihood of diagnosing this abnormality on a real patient.

Virtual patients: ED-2 band-aid or valuable asset in the learning portfolio?

The challenge of planning a clinical clerkship curriculum is to create order from chaos. Fortunately, the Liaison Committee for Medical Education has thrown clerkship directors a lifeline by recognizing simulated learning experiences--including virtual patients--as equivalents to real-life clinical encounters for accreditation purposes. Although virtual patients offer a more consistent and learner-centered curriculum that provides greater practice opportunities and reduces the demand for busy clinical preceptors, going virtual does involve potential risks. Here, the authors discuss some of the pros and cons of virtual patients, especially the concerns that virtual learning experiences may not produce effective feedback and that learning may not transfer from the virtual to the clinical environment. To match teaching to different learning needs, the authors propose "adaptive feedback" whereby learners choose from three levels of feedback: seeing the correct diagnosis and patient outcomes, seeing an expert "trace," and/or meeting with their preceptor to discuss the case. Medical educators can facilitate automatic transfer of learning from the virtual to the clinical setting by making all aspects of the learning and retrieval environments as similar as possible and by integrating the virtual and clinical environments--thus sparing learners the burden of "forward reaching" transfer and providing an anchor for virtual learning experiences. Medical educators can promote intentional transfer of learning if they make the virtual learning environment both the place students practice their skills before clinical encounters and the place to which they return after clinical encounters to reflect on and improve their skills.

The effect of simulator training on clinical skills acquisition, retention and transfer.

CONTEXT: Prior research has demonstrated that residents have poor clinical skills in cardiology and respirology. It is not clear how these skills can be improved because the number of patients with suitable clinical findings whose cooperation might help residents to better develop these clinical skills is limited. Objectives Our objective was to evaluate the effect of training on a cardiorespiratory simulator (CRS) on skills acquisition, retention and transfer. METHODS: We randomly allocated 146 students to CRS training in either chest pain or dyspnoea and compared each student's performance on the clinical presentation in which he or she had received CRS training with performance on the control presentation. RESULTS: Immediately after training, students were more accurate in identifying abnormal clinical findings on the CRS (70.0% versus 52.2%; d = 7.6, P < 0.0001) and showed improved diagnostic performance (72.1% versus 55.6%; d = 4.3, P = 0.0007) on the training clinical presentation. At the end of the course they were still better at identifying abnormal findings (57.1% versus 51.7%; d = 2.5, P = 0.004) and diagnosing correctly (50.0% versus 38.1%; d = 3.0, P = 0.002) on problems included in the training clinical presentation. However, they showed no difference between training and control presentations in diagnostic performance when required to transfer their skills between problems (45.9% versus 43.8%; P = 0.5) or in performance on multiple-choice questions (64.1% versus 63.6%; P = 0.8). CONCLUSIONS: Students can acquire and retain clinical skills with CRS training, but demonstrate limited ability to transfer these to other problems. Further studies are needed to explore ways of improving learning and transfer with CRS training.