Last week at the JISC expert teaching group meeting I had the pleasure of chairing a session by Dr Virendra Mistry, of the Glamorgan Clinical Simulation centre who talked about his experiences running a Learning and Teaching Innovation grant project, SCALE.
The project looked at the LTIG criteria:
-Projects should be unique or pioneering – something that has not been done previously;
-Projects Could be considered to be a “high-risk” intervention;
-Projects use IT to directly benefit learning or the learning process, not just innovative to the bidding department or institution, but can also be considered to be innovative within the wider JISC community.
The project found a match to an idea that would help solve a problem they had in an area currently taught with mannequins.
These mannequins are rather special and can simulate a variety of conditions, but they are very expensive, and can only be used by 5 students at a time.
The project created 4 videos that showed respiratory problems, cardiological problems, neurological problems and shock treatments.
Then used twitter in synchronous and asynchronous situations to support learning around patient assessment. The series of ‘tweets’ highlighted the deterioration or improvement in a patient’s condition, and learners had to tweet back appropriate courses of action, based on the evolving symptoms. The flow of responses were then reviewed and discussed to identify whether correct diagnoses were made, and whether learning had taken place.
More details of the project can be found on the website: http://hesas.glam.ac.uk/simulation/scale/
Or by searching twitter using the #scaleproject hashtag, or looking for @iStanGlamorgan .
The project Final report is due in November.