Interactive Computer-Based-Training in Medicine – An example from Emergency Medicine

Marftin Dugas
IBE, University of Munich, Germany

ABSTRACT:
Emergency medicine is characterized by rapid decision making to help patients in life-threatening situations. Teaching these skills requires a high level of interaction between medical students and the teacher. We introduced Interactive Computer-Based-Training to provide a more active way of learning emergency medicine: the lecturer presents real situations with slides and video. The students have to answer free-formed questions and multiple-choice-questions on a computer. All answers given by the students are displayed on a large video screen thus enabling a detailed discussion. This interactive technique allows for an immediate feedback to the teacher based on the specific knowledge of his group. At the end of the lesson a summary of all answers is provided for the lecturer for review purposes. The technical concept is based on intranet-technology with PERL-programs. The tools to generate these interactive courses are generic and platform-independent; the concept is scalable to any medical subject.

BENEFIT TO PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING SESSION:
We developed a CBT-system, which has been in routine use for more than two years. Participants can benefit from our experiences how to implement CBT for medical students with integration into the curriculum. From a technical point of view, we have been using from the beginning Internet-Technology including MPEG-2 videos. The lessons we learned concerning technology may be of interest to the participants

Dr. med. Dipl.-Inform. Martin DUGAS
Department of Medical Informatics (IBE)
University of Munich
Marchioninistr. 15
D-81377 Munich, Germany
Phone: +49-89-7095-4497
Fax: +49-89-7095-7491
Email: dug@ibe.med.uni-muenchen.de
Website: http://www.med.uni-muenchen.de/ibe/mitarbeiter/dugas.html

CO-AUTHORS:
F. Christ, F. Demetz, M. Batschkus, K. ‹berla
IBE (see above) and Department of Anesthesiology (same address)
Email: bat@ibe.med.uni-muenchen.de