Online Tool Puts Neuro-Ophthalmology at Your Fingertips

Decades of teaching in the U.S. and around the world have made Jonathan Trobe, M.D., an ardent observer of how people— especially medical students—learn.

A professor of both Ophthalmology and Neurology, in 2014 Dr. Trobe led the multidisciplinary team that developed The Eyes Have It— a groundbreaking website and mobile app now widely used to impart ophthalmology basics to medical students and providers.

Building on that success, Dr. Trobe has taken on an even more ambitious project: an online study tool devoted to his clinical specialty. Fifteen years in the making, he and a new team created Neuro-Ophthalmology at Your Fingertips. (https://michmed.org/fingertips)

Dozens of narrated videos, animations and anatomic illustrations bring to life 27 topics, each presented in a sequence of tabs:

• What is it?

• How does it appear?

• What else looks like it?

• What should you do?

• What will happen?

“This is the same approach used by the Audubon Society to help people differentiate between and retain information about birds,” explains Dr. Trobe. Users can expand and collapse each section, learning at their own pace without becoming overwhelmed by the depth of content. Common clinical observations – TIPS and TRAPS—are interspersed throughout. And a self-guided quiz section employs 100 clinical case studies to test the user’s knowledge. Since its launch three years ago, the site has continued to grow its user base within U-M and beyond, including students of ophthalmology, optometry, neurology, pediatrics, neurosurgery and emergency medicine. Embraced as a teaching tool by the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society (NANOS), it now resides within the Neuro-Ophthalmology Virtual Education Library (NOVEL) hosted by the University of Utah.

“Students succeed when the material is intriguing, useful and enjoyable,” says Dr. Trobe. “Learning should be fun, or you won’t do it.”

Dr. Trobe credits U-M and Kellogg leadership and a generous donation from former ophthalmology resident trainee Bithika Kheterpal, M.D., with making the project possible. Major contributions were made by David Murrel and Robert Prusak in art and design, Marc Stephens, Richard Hackel, and Tim Steffens in video editing, and Andrew Moses and Lisa Burkhart in programming.