Marianus Ifland

Acceptance of medical training cases as supplement to lectures

Introduction: Medical training cases (virtual patients) are in widespread use for student education. Most publications report about development and experiences in one course with training cases. In this paper we compare the acceptance of different training case courses with different usages deployed as supplement to lectures of the medical faculty of Wuerzburg university during a period of three semesters. Methods: The training cases were developed with the authoring tool CaseTrain and are available for students via the Moodle-based eLearning platform WueCampus at Wuerzburg university. Various data about usage and acceptance is automatically collected. Results: From WS (winter semester) 08/09 till WS 09/10 19 courses with about 200 cases were available. In each semester, about 550 different medical students from Würzburg and 50 students from other universities processed about 12000 training cases and filled in about 2000 evaluation forms. In different courses, the usage varied between less than 50 and more than 5000 processed cases. Discussion: Although students demand training cases as supplement to all lectures, the data show that the usage does not primarily depend on the quality of the available training cases. Instead, the training cases of nearly all case collections were processed extremely often shortly before the examination. It shows that the degree of usage depends primarily on the perceived relevance of the training cases for the examination.

Cost analysis for computer supported multiple-choice paper examinations

Introduction: Multiple-choice-examinations are still fundamental for assessment in medical degree programs. In addition to content related research, the optimization of the technical procedure is an important question. Medical examiners face three options: paper-based examinations with or without computer support or completely electronic examinations. Critical aspects are the effort for formatting, the logistic effort during the actual examination, quality, promptness and effort of the correction, the time for making the documents available for inspection by the students, and the statistical analysis of the examination results. Methods: Since three semesters a computer program for input and formatting of MC-questions in medical and other paper-based examinations is used and continuously improved at Wuerzburg University. In the winter semester (WS) 2009/10 eleven, in the summer semester (SS) 2010 twelve and in WS 2010/11 thirteen medical examinations were accomplished with the program and automatically evaluated. For the last two semesters the remaining manual workload was recorded. Results: The cost of the formatting and the subsequent analysis including adjustments of the analysis of an average examination with about 140 participants and about 35 questions was 5-7 hours for exams without complications in the winter semester 2009/2010, about 2 hours in SS 2010 and about 1.5 hours in the winter semester 2010/11. Including exams with complications, the average time was about 3 hours per exam in SS 2010 and 2.67 hours for the WS 10/11. Discussion: For conventional multiple-choice exams the computer-based formatting and evaluation of paper-based exams offers a significant time reduction for lecturers in comparison with the manual correction of paper-based exams and compared to purely electronically conducted exams it needs a much simpler technological infrastructure and fewer staff during the exam.