Learning from Cases Online

Medical cases can be very effective teaching tools.  Sometimes, though, it’s hard to know exactly what to include in a teaching case, especially when it’s presented online.  

For a good resource on developing cases, you can look through a recent paper in Teaching and Learning Medicine (1). 

The authors looked at online case-based presentations and scored each one on a series of features that make for a “good” case:

• Relevance
• Engagement
• Challenge
• Instructional strategies

Only a few of the online cases they reviewed scored well on their metric, which shows that many online cases aren't as good as they could be.  

This framework/checklist is a good way to look at cases and it’s worthwhile looking at the examples they present.  

The paper is worth taking a look at if you’re in the process of trying to develop case-based learning materials, or you want to review existing cases.



1. Kim, S., Phillips, W.R., Huntington, J., Astion, M.L., Keerbs, A., Pinskey, L., Dresden, G., Sharma, U., and D.W. Shearer (2007). Medical case teaching on the web.  Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 19(2), 106-114.  


http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10401330701332169