Element Explorer & the Library

Most of Theta is built around full clinical lessons. 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:

• Element Explorer — an interactive browser for a single element type. Adjust its design, watch it react live, try it in the simulator, and keep it as a lesson if you like.
• Library — a shelf of pre-made practice lessons grouped by clinical topic, playable any time with no stakes.

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

The Element Explorer

The Element Explorer lets you jump straight into the simulator with a single element — no lesson to set up. It's the fastest way to learn how one test type works in isolation, and a quick way to build a one-test lesson. Open it from the Element Explorer card on your Dashboard, under Theta — beside My workspace on a wider screen. Everyone has it, whatever organizations they belong to.

Trying is temporary: nothing is kept until you save it.

Its 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. Pick the standard. Element preset, above the design, sets the standard it runs on — symbols, interaural attenuation, masking rules. It starts on your own default (your account's element preset — Theta's unless you've chosen another). Switch it and the same patient is redrawn under the new standard; if you'd rather keep the new one, Make this my default sets it — which also applies to the Audiogram of the Day, weekly challenges, library practice and paid courses.

2. 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.

3. Try it in the simulator. Press Try in simulator to run your current design as a quick trial — exactly as a learner would encounter it, but with nothing recorded. Back to the explorer (or closing the results) returns you to the explorer with your design just as you left it.

4. Save it as a lesson (optional). Press Save as lesson — on the explorer, or at the foot of the trial's results — and give it a title. If you're an instructor or admin anywhere, Save to also asks where it goes:

   • My workspace — the private space every account has. Kept exactly as you tried it; find it under My lessons in the workspace.
   • An organization you teach in — it joins that organization's Lessons, ready to add to a course, and takes that organization's element preset (the same patient, under its standard).

   Saved to … confirms where it went, with links to open it in the designer or see the lessons it's now among.

Every explorer is open to every account, and Try in simulator always works. What a plan buys is keeping the result in My workspace: cards marked Pro to save need Theta Pro there — every specialty element (Acoustic Reflexes, Acoustic Reflex Decay, OAE and Auditory Brainstem Response) and Hearing aids (which saves the audiogram and a Hearing Aid case). Audiometry, Tympanometry and Otoscopy save on a free account. Saving into an organization you teach in takes any of them, so an instructor sees no Pro to save badges on the cards — and where their own workspace can't take an element, the save window simply offers their organizations. 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 patient 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.

Try in simulator here takes you straight into the speech console on the case you've built, with all five tests — SAT, SRT, WRS, MCL and UCL — available to measure, and a spondee list and word lists already selected.

There's no audiometry step. The point of this explorer is speech testing, not repeating audiometry, so the audiogram is given to you rather than tested: it doesn't appear as its own step and isn't part of your result. It's still right there when you need it — Show audiogram opens it beside the console, filled in, so you can reason about masking and presentation levels against the thresholds the case was built on.

The hearing aid explorer

The Hearing aids card lays one ear's chain out left to right — the device, the fitting, and REM — and everything recomputes as you change the aid or the audiogram. Its Display (gear) menus carry the same two teaching views as a lesson's practice mode: Device limitations on the fitting (the receiver, the dome and vent, and the feedback share, taken apart) and the Gain builder on REM (how each speech curve adds up). The speech map draws it as a lesson does: the patient's UCL as a dotted line — the limit, shaded gray above — and the MPO as an asterisk at each band (here always shown, set to the receiver's OSPL90, so it rises with receiver power; an asterisk in the gray is too loud for this patient). As in a lesson, an open fit leaks its lows out of the vent, so below 1 kHz the aid adds nothing in the ear, and the receiver rolls off above 4 kHz.

The Library

The Library is a browseable shelf of pre-made practice lessons, 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 lesson 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 lessons in that topic you've tried (e.g. "3/8 lessons 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.

What's inside a topic

A topic is built to be read as well as practised, in three parts:

1. A short reading at the top of the shelf that teaches the topic before you touch a lesson — what the thing is, how it's measured, and what separates the patterns you're about to see. Opening it counts toward your progress.
2. The lessons. Each one opens on an Info tab that briefs you before you start: the concept, which console controls you'll need (with their keyboard shortcuts), and exactly what to measure. Switch to the simulator tab, work the lesson, and submit.
3. A short quiz at the end, checking the ideas rather than the technique.

After you submit a lesson, its report carries a second piece of teaching that was hidden while you worked: what you should have found, how to tell it apart from the patterns it resembles, and the classic pitfall. It's worth reading even when you scored well.

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 the Element Explorer when you want to understand one test — how an audiogram shape, a tympanogram type, or a reflex pattern behaves — without committing to a whole lesson.
• Use the Library when you want to practice a topic end to end, casually, with lessons 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 lessons work.