Finishing his masters degree in Design and Visual Communication Design, Marc Brisbourne found his inspiration from an unlikely source - medical students. After working for the multimedia development group in the Faculty of Medicine for six years, Brisbourne saw that the faculty sometimes had trouble coordinating tutors and students for group problem sessions.

Brisbourne's thesis presentation, Collaborative construction of diagrams for higher-order thinking: Providing a framework to help medical students diagnose patient cases was on display at the Fine Arts Building Gallery from May 24 through June 4.

A major component of medical students' learning comes from group sessions in which students gather with a senior physician tutor to solve simulated patient cases - a technique referred to as problem-based learning, Brisbourne said.

"Students work under the guidance of a tutor to help solve each case," he said. "Problem-based learning is intended to integrate basic science and clinical reasoning to create doctors who are better at the reasoning process."

However, the faculty has run into trouble getting physicians to come away from their research and practices to tutor the learning groups.

"Some of the teaching blocks that have had trouble getting tutors are therefore not doing any problem-based learning - but it's supposed to be such a helpful tool," Brisbourne said.

"So I'm proposing a web-based application - more than just a static set of web pages - and this is a tool to support some things that happen in a problem-based, learning tutorial, not as a replacement."

Brisbourne envisioned cutting down the number of hours required of the tutors while still allowing students to work in learning groups. Brisbourne says that his program will assist students in the early stages of the tutorials organize their thoughts before the tutors arrive.

This application is innovative in that it encourages non-linear thinking.

"Presenting information in a diagrammatic way allows you to see the simultaneous presentation of information. You can see hierarchies, inclusions, relationships between information that is prohibitive in a linear text document or a traditional on-line forum," he said.

"One way I could have approached this problem would be to use an on-line forum, but I believe that visual diagrams are a much more powerful way of visualizing things."

So far, feedback from several test sessions has been positive, and he has received an Access Grant to continue this project past his thesis presentation. However, Brisbourne notes that he was surprised to find that students like personal interaction in the learning sessions.

"I thought that students would be comfortable collaborating with each other at a distance, from their home computers," he said. "But they said they would much prefer working as a group in front of a computer."

Brisbourne is quick to point out that this project wouldn't have been possible without input from the medical students, doctors, and colleagues.

"One of the reasons I went into the masters program is that I identified gaps in my education and I thought that it would answer some of my questions. It's opened a million more instead," Brisbourne said. "I think that it's refined my skills as a designer, a teacher, and also as a multimedia developer."

"And it's also confirmed my ideas in the power of diagrams."