Developing and evaluating virtual anatomy resources for teaching allied health disciplines

Abstract

Allied health professionals require an understanding of anatomy for purposes such as planning radiotherapy, or treating muscle imbalance. In practice, they will rarely see the structure they are treating, but seeing it during their education is invaluable. To reveal deep structures in the human body, neighbouring structures are unavoidably removed as a donated human body is dissected. Academic and clinical staff approached the challenge for students' understanding of the male reproductive and urinary system, which is indeed disrupted by dissection. An existing radiotherapy planning instrument Virtual Environment for Radiotherapy Training was used to create videos of real patients' internal structures. Structures difficult to see in dissection, models and images were transformed from magnetic resonance and computerised tomography scans into videos that appeared three-dimensional, for use by students learning anatomy. Qualitative evaluation of these anatomy videos suggested that they can be accessed at students' convenience and can be customised with captions, pauses or quizzes. Quantitative evaluation suggested that offering assessment-related incentives may not result in all students choosing to access the videos, but that those who did performed better on both labelling and short answer explanations of related content on immediate and short-term testing.

Innovation in Pediatric Clinical Education: The Development of a Clinical Instructor Toolkit

“…Resource review: Existing literature described the process of creating toolkits but lacked evidence of ongoing review and responsiveness to the contemporary needs of clinical educators. [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] e task force prioritized creation of a transparent resource review process to establish a mechanism for the addition of new resources and to articulate to contributors and users how each resource was reviewed. e evaluation criteria are broad to capture relevant content that is evidenced based as well as content created by CIs based on their personal clinical teaching experiences.…”

“…At the time of publication, the CI Toolkit contains 160 resources, organized into 5 Existing literature describing health professions toolkits focused on interprofessional education, 20 didactic content teaching resources, 21 diagnosis-specific provider service delivery guides, 22,23 and student CE resources [24][25][26] rather than teaching resources for CIs. One study explored the needs for a Web-based CE resources for preceptors and created online clinical teaching modules based on the identified needs from the survey, similar to the CI Toolkit development process.…”