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Education, Microbiology, News
Dr. Oli Prepares Medical Students for Real-life Situations
Table of contents
Dr. Oli has created the “GIDEON diagnostic game” where students take on different roles to diagnose a disease
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities all over the world had to accelerate their digital teaching programs. This has created a greater need for online tools that support the challenges of preparing students for life after graduation. This is especially true when teaching medical students – it is critically important future health professionals are taught practical and critical thinking techniques that are based on real-life situations.
Dr. Monika Oli has been speaking with Times Higher Education about the challenges of teaching microbiology online and how GIDEON can bring value to the virtual classroom. Dr. Oli explains that traditional teaching techniques may focus on identifying a few pathogens found in most laboratories, which can create “a completely artificial scenario which would never happen in the real world”.
How can a future medical doctor learn to differentiate between diseases with similar symptoms, such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Lyme disease? In a real-world scenario, you can’t “just open page 510 of the textbook and diagnose the patient…You have to think outside the box” and this is where Dr. Oli brings GIDEON in.
Dr. Oli has created the “GIDEON diagnostic game” where students take on different roles – epidemiologist, doctor, microbiologists, etc. – and use GIDEON’s Bayesian analysis-driven diagnostic tools to help create the list of likely diseases. This is followed by exploring the database to determine the best treatment plan and even speculating whether the patient would have survived or not in a given scenario!
The game proved to be very popular with students. But Dr. Oli didn’t stop there, she further encouraged future medics to analyze issues relevant today by building an exam around secondary infections of COVID-19.
“Many COVID-19 patients get secondary infections that are bacterial, so I built my whole exam around it. Students were given data and had to use GIDEON to analyze the secondary infection, how it should be treated, whether it will contribute to COVID-19 resistance, so the role play continued even during the exams.”
If you are a teacher looking for new ways to engage and challenge your students, GIDEON might be the right tool for the job. Try it free!