title: Acceptance of medical training cases as supplement to lectures.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Medical training cases (virtual patients) are in widespread use for student education. Most publications report about development and experiences in one course with training cases. In this paper we compare the acceptance of different training case courses with different usages deployed as supplement to lectures of the medical faculty of Wuerzburg university during a period of three semesters.
  
  
  METHODS
  The training cases were developed with the authoring tool CaseTrain and are available for students via the Moodle-based eLearning platform WueCampus at Wuerzburg university. Various data about usage and acceptance is automatically collected.
  
  
  RESULTS
  From WS (winter semester) 08/09 till WS 09/10 19 courses with about 200 cases were available. In each semester, about 550 different medical students from Würzburg and 50 students from other universities processed about 12000 training cases and filled in about 2000 evaluation forms. In different courses, the usage varied between less than 50 and more than 5000 processed cases.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Although students demand training cases as supplement to all lectures, the data show that the usage does not primarily depend on the quality of the available training cases. Instead, the training cases of nearly all case collections were processed extremely often shortly before the examination. It shows that the degree of usage depends primarily on the perceived relevance of the training cases for the examination.
authors.affiliation: Universität Würzburg, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Lehrstuhl für Künstliche Intelligenz und Angewandte Informatik, Würzburg, Deutschland.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hörnlein
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mandel
authors.forename: Marianus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ifland
authors.forename: Edeltraud
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lüneberg
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Deckert
authors.forename: Frank
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Puppe