UMass Stroke Curriculum Flourishes on the Web
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.”
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.
