Guru Honorable Mention: Diagnosis Simulation by Russ Sawchuk

This post by Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks features one of the Honorable Mentions from the 2010 Articulate Guru Awards. To see other award-winning courses from the Guru Awards, check out the posts here.

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This week we’re bringing you more inspiring Honorable Mentions from the Articulate Guru Awards!

Today’s featured course is a nursing diagnosis simulation built by Russ Sawchuk. Russ is president of Steppingstones Partnership, Inc., and he created the course as part of a website called The Learning Nurse, which provides continuing education and professional development resources for nurses.

So put on your nurse’s hat for a moment and get ready to experience what it’s like to assess and diagnose a patient! Click below to see the course that Russ built:

View the Nasal Simulation Course

What caught the judge’s eyes? The judges liked how the course gives learners so much control over how they gather information. Inspired by the course design that Tom Kuhlmann shared in this blog post, Russ went with a clean slide-only view in his Articulate Presenter player, and he incorporated all sorts of engaging interactivity. He uses hyperlinks and branching to let you choose which patient to interview, which questions to ask, when to assess the patient’s physical symptoms, and when to submit a diagnosis.

Judges also liked Russ’s effective use of talking avatars to provide realistic answers to the learner’s diagnostic questions. He created the avatars with a tool called Character Builder and inserted each character as a SWF movie in Articulate Presenter. (Some of the characters’ responses, in fact, are so true-to-life, you’ll think you’re actually eavesdropping on my Aunt Thelma the last time she had a head cold and was grousing to the clinic nurse.)

Any time you want, you can click “View Disorders” to read up on the problems that might be causing your patient’s discomfort. Once you make a diagnosis, Russ provides on-slide feedback to let you know whether you chose correctly. Judges also appreciated how learners can click “Take the Quiz” for a more formal way of assessing their knowledge about nasal and sinus problems.

And speaking of the quiz, the judges noted that Russ did a nice job using Quizmaker’s randomization and pooling feature to present a random sample of 20 questions to the learner with each quiz attempt.

Here’s a screencast where Russ gives you a quick tour of the course and some of the neat features in it:

View this screencast at Screenr

Really nice work with this course, Russ — congratulations on earning an Articulate Guru Honorable Mention!