THE Awards: Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year
It was exciting to see Queen Mary winning an award for “Most Improved Student Experience” at the Times Higher Education Awards which were announced on October 15th. Looking through the list of winners I was also interested to see the winner of the “Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year”, a project involving, amongst others, St George’s, University of London which is investigating the use of a virtual environment (Second Life) to create immersive problem-based learning (PBL) scenarios for healthcare training. St George’s has been involved in the development of scenarios for its Paramedic Foundation Degree and another project partner, Coventry University, has been developing them for its MA in Clinical Management.
It looks like a very interesting project and although the work appears to be continuing in a variety of forms the final JISC project report is available from the project blog (link below). It’s an interesting read, things that caught my eye particularly were:
- The decision to go with “avatar-driven” scenarios rather than more traditional “information-driven” scenarios. Originally, only half of the scenarios were to be avatar-driven however after early testing it appeared that there was “more value provided by the avatar-driven model”. I’d like to know more about the specific differences between these two different types of scenarios. I’m not actually sure I really understand the difference and I wonder what implications this has for those developing the scenarios.
- The relatively high specifications required to run the Second Life environment remain a real concern. This turned out to be a particular issue in the part of the project undertaken at Coventry which was dealing with distance learners. The problem was overcome through the ability to deliver the scenarios through the Moodle virtual learning environment using more standard web tools.
- The increased overhead placed on the PBL facilitators relative to that in the traditional face to face sessions. It is clear that a way has to be found to get around this issue for the approach to be successful and the project investigators mention the possibility of using an approach based on “lead-student facilitation”.
Another output from the project is the PIVOTE virtual learning authoring system. This system is based on the MedBiquitous virtual patient standard and allows all the information supporting the scenario to be kept outside of the particular virtual world itself. So while the PREVIEW project has chosen to use the Second Life environment, controllers for other virtual worlds can be built. Also, the scenarios can be delivered without the use of a virtual world, using more standard web tools.
So, while the project has indeed been very successful, it’ll be interesting to see how the area develops. None of the facilitators involved in the study were currently willing to adopt the approach in their courses giving their main concerns as “time needed for facilitation, usability and access to Second Life”.
Links
Paramedic training in virtual environments honoured by JISC Times Higher Education Award News item on the JISC web site.
The Preview Project Blog
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