Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
UMass Stroke Curriculum Flourishes on the Web
12/26/2001
Recognizing that students learn in different ways, the team developed multiple opportunities to learn. The architecture is student-driven. Riza points out that students worked on the project as well, doing usability testing that led to a number of improvements and even working as videographers.
Student James Bath was in the first class to receive the Web-based stroke curriculum and gives it high marks. “The language is very easy to understand,” he says. “As first years, we had a very limited medical vocabulary, and the site was careful not to talk over our heads. The animation and pictures are especially helpful when learning routes of blood flow and locations of critical structures in the brain—much more helpful than standard diagrams found in textbooks.”
New to the project is the Stroke Risk Detective, an interactive video case bank created with Macromedia Inc.’s Flash Web development application. Using the detective tool, students work with excerpts from patient videos to study risk factors and determine counseling strategies that will likely generate the best possible result for the patient. Students determine what risk factors to address, and StrokeSTOP delivers the patient response.
“In a clinical setting, physicians have to make choices, to prioritize the management of multiple risk factors in a patient,” Billings-Gagliardi says. “So one of the goals of StrokeSTOP is to give students experience working with real patient situations, where there may be a lot of different risk factors and they have to determine what makes sense for each patient.”
At the end of the exercise, students can view the actual physician’s decisions and compare them to their own. Exposure to the counseling experience gives first-year students additional opportunities to develop their patient interviewing skills.
UMass faculty use StrokeSTOP in class and assign it for outside study. “Learning the program was not a requirement per se, but was the best means of learning about stroke,” Bath notes.
He especially appreciated the program’s flexibility. “The program
can be as easy or as in-depth as one needs it to be, depending on your goals,”
he says. “For students, it not only provides an excellent overview of stroke
and its causes, it provides many learning tools to test our knowledge throughout
the course.”
For more information, visit www.strokeassociation.org or www.umassmed.edu/strokestop.
Recommended Reading
- Microsoft Changes Virtualization Licensing Rules
Microsoft has made substantial changes to its virtualization licensing program, changes that will lower the cost of using virtualization for many customers.
- Vorex Upgrades Web-based Data Collection Tool for Schools
Vorex has released an update to its Vorex Online Survey, a Web-based data collection tool designed to allow schools to collect information and gather feedback from education stakeholders.
- Georgia Virtual Tech Moves to Angel LMS for Web-based Instruction
Georgia Virtual Technical College has selected the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) as the platform for its portal to deliver Web-based instruction to Georgia's 33 technical colleges and one Board of Regents college.
- Video Spotlight: Campus Technology 2008 Keynote Address
Adrian Sannier, technology officer for Arizona State University, discusses strategies for putting in place ground-breaking plans that will serve the next generation of students. These are actionable visions that include strategic technology choices--advancements that may be unfamiliar or even unpopular at first, but which carry enormous potential.
- Report Finds Dip in Microsoft's Browser Share
Microsoft lost browser market share over the last year, and the company's Windows Vista operating system has had "slow" market adoption among individuals and enterprises, according to a report issued by management consulting firm Janco Associates Inc.
- AT&T 'Big Mobile' Grant Extended
AT&T has extended the deadline for its first-ever Big Mobile On Campus Challenge, a competition that calls on college and university faculty and students to develop apps for mobile devices. The top prize includes $10,000 and a trip to the October Educause 2008 conference for the winning individual or team.
