Case 8 – Virtual patient cases developed by students using Labyrinth

This is the description of the case 8 for activity 2 in course H807

Background and context

Managed by College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine of Edinburgh University, the activity target the creation of virtual patients case studies by final year student. The activity has been running twice and should be carried over each year.

Project description

During one week, in a workshop of five weeks, the students are first brought up to usage of Labyrinth, an authoring tool developed in-house by the Learning Technology Section of the college. In group of three, the students have access 7/7 to the platform to create new branching pathway virtual patients in the theme of tropical animal medicine.

At the end of the week, the scenarios are quality assured through a tutor assessment process for use by the student community as learning resources.

Tools in use

Labyrinth : a medical case studies authoring tool
VUE : a freeware concept mapping application
UG Veterinary VLE : in-house e-learning and learning resource repository.

Tangible benefits

Student satisfaction
evaluated informally, verbally but recorded on minidisk. The students are forced to think like professionals rather than students. The activity requires from students the consolidation of existing knowledge, the learning of new knowledge, the applying of knowledge to a virtual representation, and the conceptualisation of real world scenario.

Staff satisfaction
evaluated informally. The staff improved its ability to deliver e-learning resources and has spared in terms of costs and time. Although the staff ware reachable by email, no sensible increase of work has be reported. After this experience, the staff is enthusiast for e-learning.

Disadvantages and drawbacks

Labyrinth is a complicate product which is difficult to manage all the subtleties in so short time as one week. At the beginning the students ware reluctant to draft their scenario with VUE before the implementation into Labyrinth.

Conditions of success

The choice of the main tool : Labyrinth which has been

• developed in-house
• licensed free
• promoted throughout the College
• presented widely at conference
• already generated high level of interest
• integrated with the existing VLE

Having organised the project as an activity of a special three weeks student elective in a specific subject.