By Supriyra Krishnan and Sian Claire Owen
The MedBiquitous Virtual Patient (MVP) technical standard enables the development of global banks of virtual patient cases.
During the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Patients, Jörn Heid from University Hospital Heidelberg, Germany, outlined how the standardization of the MVP allows the development of additional standards. Bearing this in mind, he has attempted to define a standardized log-API in Javascript for logging events from a MVP compatible player onto the learning management system (LMS) or external server.
This logging API is provided as a proposal at http://code.google.com/p/mvp-log-api as open source software. It provides the possibility to plug in different consumers, who, for example, can use the event data to visualize the learner’s progress.
“Having a standard for the data representation makes it possible to build tools for assessment and evaluation based on this proposal, so that tools can be used with different systems at different universities,” said Heid. “So instead of reinventing the wheel again and again, the research can focus on new approaches, and can compare the effects of different learning systems.”
Heid described how the log-API was developed to transmit data to the MVP-server, which can then generate reports on the user’s activities and progression through the VP case.
Consumers have just to register at the log-API, after which they are able to analyse the following examples:
- Walk-through of pages
- Time consumption
- Frequency of pages
- Media usage
- Results of formative assessment.
Jörn encourages developers to implement the API in their players and to help to improve it, so that work on tools for log event analysis for all compatible players can be brought into focus for researchers.
