Description

Twenty-five cases were developed and posted on WebCT for students to learn TMOD on their own. Each case included text description and some of them had clinic photos attached.

Intended Educational Value

This case series can help students to be able to:

1. correctly diagnose different ocular conditions from the provided signs, symptoms and relevant clinical examination results;
2. determine the most appropriate treatment plan; and
3. criticize the management plan for different ocular conditions.

Example of Application

Twenty-five cases were posted on WebCT for students to learn TMOD on their own. These cases were launched in two phases (10 cases in the period between 23 March and 8 April and 15 cases in the period between 13 April and 26 April). The first 10 cases were simpler and the remaining 15 cases were more difficult. All of the cases began with a presentation of typical signs and symptoms of the disease for students to make a correct diagnosis. Students were then required to choose an appropriate treatment protocol from the list of different options. Some of the cases had answer fields for open-ended questions. Students were given two attempts to answer each question for each case. Correct answers would be provided after the final submission was made, and this told students whether their answers were correct or not.

Evaluation/ Comments

After the two phases finished, an evaluation form was sent to each participating student to assess his/ her performance. It was found that all students were able to make correct diagnoses in most cases. For more difficult cases, more students gave wrong answers. It was considered to be satisfactory if over half of the students could answer all questions correctly for each case. However, in these 25 cases, most students could answer correctly in 5 cases only. Since the system might mistakenly take students’ correct answers for wrong due to the inadequate design of the matching of the submitted answers and the model answers, it was unfair to say these students had a very poor performance in this assessment.

Remarks

If you would like to have the access to these case studies, please feel free to contact the project leader.