Case-Based Methods and Reasoning Environments April 11, 2010

Case-Based Learning and Reasoning emphasizes learning in context and like other models, uses stories as cases. I like the idea that students benefit from “lessons learned” from their peers. In case-based reasoning, I like how each new case will add to students’ memories and their libraries; and that they will use that information to help them in solving future cases. In Jonassen’s article, I thought the bulleted list on page 2 talking about the functions of stories was very interesting.  I also thought the Turfgrass Case Library was really neat. There weren’t a lot of cases, but I can see this being really neat if a lot of people started contributing to it.

This model is perfect for my teaching area and I plan to incorporate it into lab courses. What makes this model fit so well for me is that students will retrieve information learned in past lessons and experiences to apply to the new case, which are mostly patient cases. An important aspect of this model for healthcare students is that students aren’t given direct solutions, but the tools they need to come up with the solution on their own. In the real healthcare world, every patient’s case will vary and be more or less complex. Nothing ever really follows the textbook cases in medicine. What I see as the most important component of this model is it gives students opportunities to practice concepts they have learned and apply them to real situations.

Like many of the other models we have looked at recently, I think the primary barriers to putting lessons like this on the Web are time, expertise, and money. However, there is good news for certain areas like healthcare and the environment. I’ve recently seen government and private funds being offered for curricular developments like these. I’m not going to go into any details about that here, but I’ve seen some people that have received new outside funds for this.

I think that combinations of Web based tools and multimedia will work well for this model, like online journals or note-taking software, discussion boards so students can share ideas, and audio/video for showing different aspects of the case. Simulation or demonstration tools would be helpful for this model. Text-based stories are also useful and can be accomplished with regular static webpages. These can be pretty easily produced with free sites like Weebly and within the schools content management system, like Moodle. Artificial Intelligence was also mentioned for this model, and I think this would be a very interesting addition to a Web-based model, but I’m not aware of any tools for this other than just hard-core programming. Who really wants to do that? Not me! I do think it would be neat though, so if anyone knows of any AI tools, let me know. One last thing, in thinking about the Turfgrass Case Library, social networking sites may be an interesting way to build libraries. I haven’t used the social networking site Ning before so I’m looking forward to using it for our final project.

On a side note – several years ago, I read a book that is great for those interested in building case studies. The foreward is by the same author as one of our readings (Jonassen). If you plan to use this method, this book is a good resource. It’s title is “The ID Case Book” and is by Peggy Ertmer and James Quinn. It’s got lots of great examples.

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