User interface complexity reduction in training systems

Abstract

Case based training systems are well accepted in medical education. The complexity of the used cases ranges from simple cases, where all symptoms and findings are presented at once and different questions concerning the diagnoses and/or therapies are to be answered, to very complex cases, where the case is presented in many steps, and each step may include several different kinds of tasks the learners have to accomplish: Determining intermediate working diagnoses, establishing findings based on multimedia data gathered by examinations, choosing examinations with the presumably best knowledge gain, controlling the therapies in follow-up sessions, while at the same time justifying all actions. Complex cases are more realistic but the complexity of the contents, the procedural complexity, the duration of execution by learners and the amount of work in authoring the case is increased. Studies have shown, that many learners dislike complex cases when they have to cope with an increased complexity of the user interface. We show in this paper, which methods we use to reduce the user interface complexity of our training system d3web.Train and how we support learners in cases where a more complex user interface is needed.

Keywords

• educational measurement
• problem-based learning
• eeds assessment [I02.594]