Abstract:

De Montfort University (DMU, Leicester, UK) is leading a teaching innovation project for the creation of a complete package for teaching and learning human parasitology in collaboration with the Spanish universities: San Pablo CEU and Miguel Hernández, and practicing Biomedical Scientists from the UK National Health Service. The DMU e-Parasitology package will be freely available on the DMU website (http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/) late in 2018 and present three modules: a theoretical unit for the study of medical parasitic diseases; a virtual laboratory and microscope sections with a complete collection of clinical slides for the study of these major diseases. To provide the user of this novel package with a holistic and complete experience for the learning of medical parasitology we have started the development of a fourth section, which will hold highly interactive virtual case studies in which the user will be provided with a medical history and different clinical slides to identify the parasites and their structures. The user will need to reflect and critically think to suggest potential diagnoses, additional diagnostic techniques, treatment and prevention techniques for that parasitic disease. A first virtual case study has been created in the DMU e-Parasitology here: http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/learn/case_studies/cs1/story_html5.html, as described in Peña-Fernández et al. (2018). The degree of difficulty is medium-high, so a background in parasitology is needed to resolve it. Comprehensive student feedback is being collected to improve this case study, which will be used as a model unit to develop future case studies for this section. To determine the feasibility of this case study to train postgraduate students, DMU students attending the MSc Advanced Biomedical Science have completed the case study during a workshop session specially delivered this academic course 2017/18 (n=9). We collected the following results: 100% students indicated that the eParasitology is interactive (71.4% agreed, 28.57 strongly agreed), and the case-study presented was appropriate for their studies (57.1% agreed, 42.9% strongly agreed). In relation to the content, all students highlighted that it was relevant for their studies (42.9% agreed, 57.1% strongly agreed), and indicated that the exercises presented were easy to understand (71.43% agreed, 28.57% strongly agreed). In the free-open questions available in the questionnaire, postgraduate students demanded more case studies and mini-formative assessments within the theoretical units that they reviewed to answer the virtual case study (free-living amoebas and Entamoeba histolytica). Finally, they suggested the provision of the correct answers throughout the case study instead of at the end.

Keywords:

DMU-eParasitology, medical parasitology training, reflection, critical thinking, virtual case studies.