Kiesewetter Jan, Hege Inga, Sailer Michael, Bauer Elisabeth, Schulz Claudia, Platz Manfred, Adler Martin
Institut für Didaktik und Ausbildungsforschung in der Medizin am Klinikum der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.
Medical School, Universität Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany.
JMIR Med Educ. 2022 Jul 28;8(3):e24306. doi: 10.2196/24306.
Learning with virtual patients is highly popular for fostering clinical reasoning in medical education. However, little learning with virtual patients is done collaboratively, despite the potential learning benefits of collaborative versus individual learning.
This paper describes the implementation of student collaboration in a virtual patient platform. Our aim was to allow pairs of students to communicate remotely with each other during virtual patient learning sessions. We hypothesized that we could provide a collaborative tool that did not impair the usability of the system compared to individual learning and that this would lead to better diagnostic accuracy for the pairs of students.
Implementing the collaboration tool had five steps: (1) searching for a suitable software library, (2) implementing the application programming interface, (3) performing technical adaptations to ensure high-quality connections for the users, (4) designing and developing the user interface, and (5) testing the usability of the tool in 270 virtual patient sessions. We compared dyad to individual diagnostic accuracy and usability with the 10-item System Usability Scale.
We recruited 137 students who worked on 6 virtual patients. Out of 270 virtual patient sessions per group (45 dyads times 6 virtual patients, and 47 students working individually times 6 virtual patients minus 2 randomly selected deleted sessions) the students made successful diagnoses in 143/270 sessions (53%, SD 26%) when working alone and 192/270 sessions (71%, SD 20%) when collaborating (P=.04, η=0.12). A usability questionnaire given to the students who used the collaboration tool showed a usability score of 82.16 (SD 1.31), representing a B+ grade.
The collaboration tool provides a generic approach for collaboration that can be used with most virtual patient systems. The collaboration tool helped students diagnose virtual patients and had good overall usability. More broadly, the collaboration tool will provide an array of new possibilities for researchers and medical educators alike to design courses for collaborative learning with virtual patients.
利用虚拟患者进行学习在医学教育中培养临床推理能力方面非常受欢迎。然而，尽管协作学习与个体学习相比有潜在的学习益处，但利用虚拟患者进行的协作学习却很少。
本文描述了在虚拟患者平台中实施学生协作的情况。我们的目标是让学生在虚拟患者学习过程中能够远程相互交流。我们假设能够提供一种协作工具，与个体学习相比不会损害系统的可用性，并且这将使学生对提高诊断准确性。
实施协作工具包括五个步骤：（1）寻找合适的软件库，（2）实现应用程序编程接口，（3）进行技术调整以确保为用户提供高质量连接，（4）设计和开发用户界面，（5）在270次虚拟患者课程中测试该工具的可用性。我们使用10项系统可用性量表比较了两人组与个体的诊断准确性和可用性。
我们招募了137名学生，他们处理了6个虚拟患者。在每组270次虚拟患者课程中（45个两人组乘以6个虚拟患者，以及47名单独学习的学生乘以6个虚拟患者减去2个随机选择删除的课程），学生单独学习时在143/270次课程中成功诊断（53%，标准差26%），协作学习时在192/270次课程中成功诊断（71%，标准差20%）（P = 0.04，η = 0.12）。向使用协作工具的学生发放的可用性问卷显示可用性得分为82.16（标准差1.31），代表B+等级。
协作工具提供了一种通用的协作方法，可用于大多数虚拟患者系统。该协作工具帮助学生诊断虚拟患者，并且总体可用性良好。更广泛地说，该协作工具将为研究人员和医学教育工作者设计虚拟患者协作学习课程提供一系列新的可能性。
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