Design considerations for delivering e-learning to surgical trainees

Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Distributed with permission.Challenges remain in leveraging e-health technologies for continuous medical education/professional development. This study examines the interface design and learning process features related to the use of multimedia in providing effective support for the knowledge and practice of surgical skills. Twenty-one surgical trainees evaluated surgical content on a CD-ROM format based on 14 interface design and 11 learning process features using a questionnaire adapted from an established tool created to assess educational multimedia. Significant Spearman’s correlations were found for seven of the 14 interface design features – ‘Navigation’, ‘Learning demands’, ‘Videos’, ‘Media integration’, ‘Level of material’, ‘Information presentation’ and ‘Overall functionality’, explaining ratings of the learning process. The interplay of interface design and learning process features of educational multimedia highlight key design considerations in e-learning. An understanding of these features is relevant to the delivery of surgical training, reflecting the current state of the art in transferring static CD-ROM content to the dynamic web or creating CD/web hybrid models of education

Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Abstracts 2004

Proceedings of the Advances in Teaching & Learning Day Regional Conference held at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 2004

Taming Wild High Dimensional Text Data with a Fuzzy Lash

The bag of words (BOW) represents a corpus in a matrix whose elements are the frequency of words. However, each row in the matrix is a very high-dimensional sparse vector. Dimension reduction (DR) is a popular method to address sparsity and high-dimensionality issues. Among different strategies to develop DR method, Unsupervised Feature Transformation (UFT) is a popular strategy to map all words on a new basis to represent BOW. The recent increase of text data and its challenges imply that DR area still needs new perspectives. Although a wide range of methods based on the UFT strategy has been developed, the fuzzy approach has not been considered for DR based on this strategy. This research investigates the application of fuzzy clustering as a DR method based on the UFT strategy to collapse BOW matrix to provide a lower-dimensional representation of documents instead of the words in a corpus. The quantitative evaluation shows that fuzzy clustering produces superior performance and features to Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), two popular DR methods based on the UFT strategy

inPractice: a practical nursing package for clinical decisions

This paper examines the recent development of a computer-assisted learning program-in Practice-at the School of Health Science, in the University of Wales Swansea. The project, which began in 2001, was developed in close collaboration with The Meningitis Trust, the aim being to produce a software package to increase nursing students knowledge of meningitis-related illnesses, and to enhance their decision-making and problem-solving skills by using lifelike scenarios. It incorporates two multimedia meningitis modules incorporating the use of text, film, and sound, in which students are presented with information about the illness (symptoms, treatment etc.), and are required to use their knowledge to make decisions at various key points. A general discussion of decision-making theories and CAL design principles is presented, which has provided a foundation for the main design aspects of the package. This is followed by an outline of how the program was created to promote students application of knowledge and their decision-making and problem-solving skills. Results from an evaluation questionnaire are presented. Consideration is also given as to how the program can be extended

Piloting mobile mixed reality simulation in paramedic distance education

New pedagogical methods delivered through mobile mixed reality (via a user-supplied mobile phone incorporating 3d printing and augmented reality) are becoming possible in distance education, shifting pedagogy from 2D images, words and videos to interactive simulations and immersive mobile skill training environments. This paper presents insights from the implementation and testing of a mobile mixed reality intervention in an Australian distance paramedic science classroom. The context of this mobile simulation study is skills acquisition in airways management focusing on direct laryngoscopy with foreign body removal. The intervention aims to assist distance education learners in practicing skills prior to attending mandatory residential schools and helps build a baseline equality between those students that study face to face and those at a distance. Outcomes from the pilot study showed improvements in several key performance indicators in the distance learners, but also demonstrated problems to overcome in the pedagogical method