A Teaching case system with a multiple viewpoint mechanism for medical education

Abstract

In medical education, the basic science curricula are coordinated in the teaching schedule or text books, usually in organ system units. Their integration occurs in the schedule or books, not in the minds of the students. Knowledge from each basic science discipline is presented in terms of organ functionalities not in the context of patient’s problems and laboratory data. Each domain expert in each department teaches the clinical knowledge and experiences from his own perspectives using his own teaching cases that were prepared in isolation by each individual. As a result, the students may experience many different teaching cases from many different clinical disciplines. All the teaching cases are isolated instances and do not have any association with each other. As a result, it is difficult for the students to relate the association with each other and fully understand the overall picture of the integrated view of the clinical knowledge within different disciplines in clinical practice. In this paper, we study how a PBL teaching case should be presented to the users in such a way that is most integrated, effective, and efficient for the users to learn about the overall viewpoints and knowledge of the patient care problems. We implement a prototype system called “HINTS” that is based on a computerized PBL system and provides many clinical teaching cases with a more integrated view in the context of the clinical cases that the students will face in the future medical practice. The system has been installed in the medical center of the National Cheng Kung University for the trials. The comments from students are in the results.