Human use regulatory affairs advisor (HURAA): learning about research ethics with intelligent learning modules

Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput. 2004 May;36(2):241-9. doi: 10.3758/bf03195569.

Abstract

The Human Use Regulatory Affairs Advisor (HURAA) is a Web-based facility that provides help and training on the ethical use of human subjects in research, based on documents and regulations in United States federal agencies. HURAA has a number of standard features of conventional Web facilities and computer-based training, such as hypertext, multimedia, help modules, glossaries, archives, links to other sites, and page-turning didactic instruction. HURAA also has these intelligent features: (1) an animated conversational agent that serves as a navigational guide for the Web facility, (2) lessons with case-based and explanation-based reasoning, (3) document retrieval through natural language queries, and (4) a context-sensitive Frequently Asked Questions segment, called Point & Query. This article describes the functional learning components of HURAA, specifies its computational architecture, and summarizes empirical tests of the facility on learners.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer-Assisted Instruction / methods*
  • Ethics, Research / education*
  • Human Experimentation / ethics*
  • Humans
  • Internet*
  • Military Medicine / education*
  • Military Medicine / ethics
  • Problem-Based Learning / methods*
  • Research Subjects
  • United States
  • User-Computer Interface