Explore & the library

Most of Theta is built around full clinical cases. But sometimes you just want to poke at one test to understand how it behaves, or practice a topic without the structure of a graded course. Two surfaces exist for exactly that:

• Explore — an interactive browser for a single element type. Adjust its design, watch it react live, then try it in the simulator.
• Library — a shelf of pre-made practice cases grouped by clinical topic, playable any time with no stakes.

This page covers both, and when to reach for each.

Explore: the element browser

Explore ("Explore the elements") lets you jump straight into the simulator with a single element — no designer to set up, nothing saved, no scoring. It's the fastest way to learn how one test type works in isolation.

The Explore home is a grid of cards, one per element:

Picking a card opens that element's explorer.

Inside an element explorer

Each explorer hosts the element's full designer — the same live preview and profile controls an instructor uses — but stripped of the lesson-building machinery. The flow is the same everywhere:

1. Adjust the design. For audiometry and tympanometry, change the profile (degree, type, configuration, values) and watch the plot update live. For otoscopy, browse the image library by category and pick a view. For acoustic reflexes, set the pattern to Normal, Elevated, or Absent and present tones to see when the reflex appears.
2. Try it in the simulator. Press Try in simulator to run your current design as a quick, throwaway trial — exactly as a learner would encounter it, but with nothing recorded.
3. Save it as a case (optional). Press Save as lesson, give it a title, and your design is saved into your personal workspace — a private space every Theta account has. You can reopen it in the designer later, or find it under My cases in the workspace.

Every explorer is open to every account, and Try in simulator always works. Cards marked Pro to save are the ones whose result needs a Pro subscription to keep: Acoustic Reflexes and OAE (specialty elements), and Hearing aids (which saves a four-element chain). Audiometry, Tympanometry and Otoscopy save on a free account. See Building a lesson.

The speech explorer

The Speech testing card opens a combined explorer that ties speech testing to its audiogram. A read-only audiogram plot and a slim profile panel (degree / type / configuration) sit on one side; the other side shows both ears' Performance- Intensity Functions (PIFs) — right in red, left in blue — with SAT, SRT, WRS, MCL and UCL marked.

Change the audiogram profile and the case regenerates live, so you can watch how the speech results follow from the hearing loss. You can also edit the speech levels directly, and adjust a rollover factor to see retrocochlear patterns. It's the clearest way to build intuition for how speech testing relates to the pure-tone picture.

The Library

The Library is a browseable shelf of pre-made practice cases, grouped by clinical topic — degrees of loss, loss types, configurations, masking, tympanometry, otoscopy, and so on. Unlike a course, the Library is broad and non-sequential: you jump into any case at any time, and there are no streaks and no stakes — just light progress tracking.

How it's organized

Topics are grouped into categories, each shown as a card with:

• A short blurb describing the topic.
• A progress line — how many cases in that topic you've tried (e.g. "3/8 cases tried"), with a small bar. A topic you've worked all the way through gets a check.

There's a search box at the top to filter topics by name, blurb, or category. Pressing a topic's Practice button opens it as a course-style hub where you can play its cases — each one explains the concept, then lets you test and submit like any other case.

Library vs. Learning Pathways

The Library and Learning Pathways both offer self-paced practice, but they're aimed at different moods:

Reach for the Library when you want to brush up on a specific topic on your own terms. Reach for Pathways when you want a guided ladder that builds a skill from easy to hard.

When to self-study vs. take a structured course

• Use Explore when you want to understand one test — how an audiogram shape, a tympanogram type, or a reflex pattern behaves — without committing to a whole case.
• Use the Library when you want to practice a topic end to end, casually, with cases someone has already built for you.
• Take a structured course (built by an instructor) when you want a sequenced curriculum that's scored and tracked as part of your record. See the submission flow for how graded cases work.