Genetics in Practice A Template for Interactive Case Studies

Genetics & Your Practice, began in 1994 as a course for primary health care practitioners to get Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits and to help health care providers learn about the importance of genetic counseling and the fundamental difference between genetic counseling and traditional health care. In a collaborative project between the March of Dimes and Idaho State University Departments of Nursing (ISU) and Continuing Education/Special Programs, the course was converted to an online asynchronous course. Since the course was primarily didactic, ISU approached a team of graduate students at Utah State University’s Department of Instructional Technology (USU) to develop an administrative template for interactive case studies and to produce one completed case study. The goals of the template system were: (1) Give students a chance to “practice”, thereby giving them a set of procedural knowledge as opposed to facts devoid of context, (2) Enable the production of any number of case studies with no additional programming costs, (3) Make it easy to update the case studies since research in the field of genetics is in a constant state of flux