Technology-enhanced surgical education: attitudes and perceptions of the endoscopic surgery community in Turkey

Visual Novels in Maxillofacial Surgery Education: A Hidden Gem

Visual novels are vital learning tools that promote student satisfaction and help them acquire the skills and knowledge needed to solve problems. They use interactive narrative designs to create a list of effective teaching strategies to enhance user experience. The practical use of these resources would require orienting learners to online training to improve their understanding of content. Educators must recognize the uniqueness of online learning designs and tools to develop effective strategies to enhance user understanding and improve student-teacher interactions. Visual novels' effectiveness in maxillofacial surgery education should involve assessing the play and diverting attention from lesson content to how effectively students learn. Deduction activities and features in the game should be informative and entertaining and make considerations for short- and long-term objectives like delivering feedback on immediate and appropriate tool use and communication. Visual novels are interactive, allowing users to control story development through specific actions. These interactive narratives are primarily used in academic and industrial contexts covering diverse subjects. These models have become increasingly crucial in maxillofacial surgery, providing technical help and improving surgery's quality and speed. Instructors could develop the games as a course component or integrate them with other course materials because they are easy to access and download. However, some visual novels have failed to incorporate educational content delivery with interactive experiences. This indicates a research gap in interactive narrative designs and the primary content delivery mechanisms. Incorporating these resources into education and practice would reduce reliance on experience alone, reducing surgical errors and mistakes. This review highlights the importance of visual novels in maxillofacial surgery education and emphasizes their educational role.

The use of educational technology for interactive teaching in lectures

Students often feel overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of knowledge and skills required to learn. Along with this challange, educational technology has been gradually introduced in medical education to facilitate learning and improve outcomes. It became an essential part of communication, storing and transferring information, audio-visual media use and production, and knowledge sharing. Technology's role has been expanding from a mere tool of study and inquiry to an approach and integrated use in education. Its use in medical education is continuously evolving. However, the impact and optimal use of various technology applications are not clearly defined. There are multiple challenges facing educators to choose the right application for the specific educational purpose. Hence, studies and evaluation reviews are needed to inform the better-defined use of educational technology. This review aims to discuss and evaluate various educational technology applications in medical education, focusing on interactive learning during lectures. Lectures and other group learning sessions are common activities used by medical schools. Promoting interactive learning in large groups is known to be challenging. The advances in technology to facilitate communication and promote interaction is a promising adjunct for lectures interactivity.

Insights From Pupil Size to Mental Workload of Surgical Residents: Feasibility of an Educational Computer-Based Surgical Simulation Environment (ECE) Considering the Hand Condition

The advantage of simulation environments is that they present various insights into real situations, where experimental research opportunities are very limited—for example, in endoscopic surgery. These operations require simultaneous use of both hands. For this reason, surgical residents need to develop several motor skills, such as eye-hand coordination and left-right hand coordination. While performing these tasks, the hand condition (dominant, nondominant, both hands) creates different degrees of mental workload, which can be assessed through mental physiological measures—namely, pupil size. Studies show that pupil size grows in direct proportion to mental workload. However, in the literature, there are very limited studies exploring this workload through the pupil sizes of the surgical residents under different hand conditions. Therefore, in this study, we present a computer-based simulation of a surgical task using eye-tracking technology to better understand the influence of the hand condition on the performance of skill-based surgical tasks in a computer-based simulated environment. The results show that under the both-hand condition, the pupil size of the surgical residents is larger than the one under the dominant and nondominant hand conditions. This indicates that when the computer-simulated surgical task is performed with both hands, it is considered more difficult than in the dominant and nondominant hand conditions. In conclusion, this study shows that pupil size measurements are sufficiently feasible to estimate the mental workload of the participants while performing surgical tasks. The results of this study can be used as a guide by instructional system designers of skill-based training programs.