Online Multimedia Teaching Tool for Parkinson’s Disease

We developed an online multimedia tool designed to enhance the student-learning environment in neurosciences through multi-sensory engagement. The combined use of scrolling text, narrations, and visual imagery engages multiple sensory modalities for effective learning, and it assists students in visualizing complex processes in the nervous system. The initial rollout of the online tool is for instruction in Parkinson’s disease (PD), but its structure is flexible and can be used for teaching a variety of subjects. The instructor can access the tool online during lecture, and students can access the same information via the internet outside of class. In addition, each chapter is stand-alone and thus can be accessed online by other faculty or students to supplement other courses. Within each chapter or module, information is presented in outline format with greater detail accessible via sequential drop-down menus. This layering of related topics creates a spatial and motor-accessed path for learning. These multiple forms of engagement offer rich information representations to improve students’ knowledge encoding, storing, and retrieval via multiple pathways. For instance, the tool includes student-controlled 2-D and 3-D animations, and video clip demonstrations of both patient case studies and on-campus research projects directly related to the subject material. Supplemental readings consist of current research articles (in Adobe Acrobat PDF file format) accessed within each educational topic. The teaching tool for PD is online at http://geroauen.usc.edu/Gero414_Beta/.