More and more students are no longer being limited to traditional means of education like lecture halls and textbooks.
Virtual simulators are beginning to make their way into classrooms around the country.
Ball State's nursing program already has one, and it’s possible more could show up in the future, said John Fillwalk, senior director of Hybrid Design Technologies.
The HDT and Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts at Ball State works with outside clients on developing new projects. Recently, the IDIA has collaborated with some of its clients to develop a virtual patient simulator and a nutrition and dietetics simulation.
“[It’s] similar to developing a game, except the difference is we’re working with scholars and experts for accuracy,” Fillwalk said.
In the nutrient and dietetics simulator, a learner is presented with a family who has a child diagnosed with diabetes. The simulator is set up with multiple choice-type questions in which the learner has to apply their knowledge of nutrition and diet to help the child.
“[The simulators] are oriented for students to apply knowledge from lectures and readings in real-world settings,” Fillwalk said.
Though he enjoyed doing both simulators, Fillwalk said the patient simulator was more fun to design.
In it, a learner enters a virtual clinical office where a patient is waiting. In this version, it’s an elderly woman with an unknown medical history. The learner has to conduct an interview similar to the real world to diagnose what’s wrong with the patient.
The catch is the simulation is completely unscripted. Unlike the nutrition and dietetics simulation that is more of a multiple choice format, the patient simulator is truly interactive.
“They are artificially intelligent,” Fillwalk said.
He said with this type of simulator, the options are potentially limitless because in the future they will hopefully be able to create new patients with unlimited scenarios for the learner to uncover.
Austin Cook, a sophomore nursing major, said the simulations are a nice touch to the learning process.
“I haven’t used one yet, but I think [a simulator] is a good thing because it helps teach new concepts [to students],” Cook said.
Neither of these simulations are currently being used on the Ball State campus, but Fillwalk said there is potential for simulators like these to come.
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