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UMass Stroke Curriculum Flourishes on the Web
12/26/2001
Most educational multimedia applications have carefully prescribed goals: to
reinforce ideas covered in class, to deliver content interactively and asynchronously,
or to simply capture the imaginations of students.
The ideal technology tool d'es all of this and more, addressing a pedagogical need in an innovative, creative way and ultimately enriching the learning experience for students.
That appears to be the case with StrokeSTOP, a new stroke curriculum developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Scientists, educators, and technologists at UMass have collaborated with the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association, to create the first online stroke curriculum for medical students.
Among Americans, stroke is the third most likely cause of death—and one of the most common ways in which people become seriously disabled. Strokes claim the lives of more than 150,000 Americans a year.
Despite the prevalence and impact of strokes, most medical students receive little or no training in stroke risk and prevention in their first year of study. It’s only later, when their studies become more specialized, that some will study strokes in depth.
However, most physicians, regardless of their specialty, have opportunities to provide stroke-related care to their patients. New risk-assessment methodologies and intervention strategies have made comprehensive stroke education even more important.
Sue Billings-Gagliardi, StrokeSTOP director and professor of cell biology and neurology at the UMass Medical School, thought there was a need to teach about stroke in the first-year neuroscience curriculum.
“Before we created StrokeSTOP,” she notes, “stroke was addressed differently with first-year students. The focus was not on prevention. We wanted to reduce the chance of stroke by teaching our students about identifying and modifying patients’ risk factors as well as about new post-stroke interventions that could make a difference in how stroke patients fare.”
The project started with written materials, but student feedback made it clear that the stroke curriculum would make an ideal interactive Web-based tool. With the support of the American Stroke Association, other medical school faculty, and the school’s technology department, StrokeSTOP was born.
The result is a set of modules focusing on the blood supply of brain structures, stroke pathology, risk assessment, prevention, diagnosis, and after-care. The modules consist of instructional text, radiographs and scans, diagrams, case studies, self-tests, and patient videos. All of the material is interactive. Students are asked to evaluate risk factors and identify affected parts of a stroke victim’s brain. Six modules are online now; eventually there will be 11 complete modules.
Says Lyn Riza, the project’s multimedia director based in Information Services, “We wanted to develop a clinical approach to the subject, where students would work with real patient cases. We made sure to include a ‘sandbox area’ where students could interact with the material.”
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