Online System for Clinical Assessment - University of Edinburgh

The College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine's Learnign Technology Section at the University of Edinburgh developed the Online System for Clinical Assessment in-house. It was originally designed for some of the OCSEs (objective, structured, clinical examinations).

teh traditional OCSEs were very time and resource intensive requiring different stations for different clinical assessment with exams (extending over two days). The online evaluations could replace some of these stations and provide a secure setting for testing the same competencies and skills.

The case study state sthat the "drivers for adopting an online approach were:
1. to reduce the possibility for students collusion
2. to reduce costs of running OSCEs whch are extremely expensive
3. to provide a system-based standard for marking
4. to reduce the complex administration underpinning assessment processes
5. to address the growing sense that existing assessment structures were not capturing as accurate a picture of student ability as was possible."

The first cohort to use OSCA were given a mock exam to familiarize them with the system and also to test the system. Students are now shown a video to introduce them to the system.

Student feeedback is positive and they find the system interface and navigation is clear. The use of OSCA has reduced the resources needed to adniminister the exams with a reduction in staff time and physical space required. Becasue exams can be completed in two back-to-back sessions the chances of student collusion has been significantly reduced. There is a grwoign bank of questions for future use.

The training required by staff could be seen as a drawback especially if smaller institutions were to consider following this route. As the system is implemented more widely the need for more secure physical spaces suitable for onine exams could also be restrictive.

Once again the case study demonstrates the need for new technologies to be well funded and developed for specific needs in specific populations. The development process and training and support needed is significant. Once the technolgies have been fine-tuned and staff are comfortable with them there seems to be more interest in using them across the institutions.

E-portfolios in Nursing and Midwifery programs - University of Wolverhampton

At the Univesity of Wolverhampton eportfolios were introduced for the "family-friendly" nursing program. This program is designed for students who have school-aged children and take the program over an extended time period (4 years and 4 months instead of 3 years).



Reasons for adopting the eportfolio included:

• the need to be able to evidence off-site study time


• encouraging online communities of practice


• students could create personal learning spaces

As in the previous case study, the eportfolio system was created in-house (PebblePad which has since become a commercial company) and designed to meet the learners need. The eportfolio seems to be particularly appropriate in healthcare settings where it allows for reflective practice and the sharing of ideas with other practitioners.

Once again training and support for both faculty and students play a key role in the successful adoption of the technology. Sample portfolios were provided to students and they were helped in a step by step manner to learn how to use the software.

There was concern about students IT skills but even those students who were new to using computers seem to have become advocates of online communities of practice.

No measurable benefits have been demonstarted but student feedback was positive and faculty reported feeling that they knew their students better through the eportfolios and were able to recognize problems and difficulties in clinical placements more quickly and respond accordingly.

One of the comments I fouund most interesting was that the eportfolios allowed students a continuity of learning because they could continue to work on their eportfolios whilst they were being evaluated. This in contrast with the finite nature of paper-based assignments and evaluations and the wait for them to be returned.

E-Portfolios - Newcastle Universty

The University of Newcastle is using e-portfolios for formative and summative assessment, as well as annual appraisal in their Medical Program. They were introduced for both practical reasons (the fact that students are not physically on campus for three years of their program, paper logs are complex and cumbersome to carry around to various clinical settings) and pedagogical reasons (providing a framework for recording and evidencing programme outcomes and student derived objectives, keeping track of meetings and actions, and reflecting on and sharing information).

The e-portfolios are now used for:

Professional development planning
Recording meetings with personal tutors
Cinical logbooks
CV


Significantly, the successful implementaion of e-portfolios has taken ten years. The e-portfolio is now embedded in the Medical Curricula at Newcastle University. The e-portfolio was developed in-house and care was taken to ensure that it was easy to use and very flexible making it adaptable for many different uses within the medical program. It was constantly fine-tuned to ensure that it met the needs of students and faculty and the criteria for effective assessment.

After the first year of use students were surveyed and focus groups were conducted. Student feedback suggests that the use of e-portfolios was a useful learning experience and encouraged them to relflect on their placements. More than half the students said it would influence their learning in the subsequent year.

The developers of the e-portofolios at Newcastle emphasize the importance of ensuring that the use of the technology is based on sound pedagogical and learning requirements and that there is a "high level of stakeholder buy-in and ownership." They also talk about the importance of having a "clarity of purpose" which I think is one of the keys to succesful implementation of technological advances. It is easy to get caught up in innovations that have potential benefits for some learners but that do not match our particular learners' needs. In this case learner needs were the driving force behind the introduction of the technology giving it the best chance of being successful.

Branching pathway virtual patient scenarios - University of Edinburgh

I took a look at this case study as we are considering creating virtual patient cases for our nursing and social work programs using similar software.

The University of Edinbugh use Labyrinth (software) for groups of students (in year five) in their department of veterinary medicine to create branching case scenarios. Students create these scenarios over one week of a three week elective. They create them collaboratively and then present them to faculty who work through them several times taking different paths each time and providing feedback to students.

Although there has been little formal evaluation of this activity and there was initially some concern about the technical skills necessary for completing the activity, student feedback has been positive.

Students expressed the feeling that "the activity of establishing scenarios featuring characters with a variety of decision points and possible variations of direction to be taken through scenarios presented them with something close to what they imagine professional practice might be like."

I am intrigued by the idea of getting students to create the scenarios themselves. I think in our context working with mature students in the distance education nursing program who might not be technically very strong it might be a good idea to introduce the scenarios as activities to work through before asking them to create their own. I am very interested by the Edinburgh students comments that the creation of the scenarios can approximate real life decision making experiences. This is something we find very difficult to create in the distance education experience with no opportunities for role playing.

I must explore this further.

If you want to read more about this case study go to

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/case-studies/tangible/edinburgh/index_html1

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Well...my frustration level with this task is sky high...having created a new blog as the course blog is not working I have just composed and lost a posting about the case studies.

I will attempt to rewrite but may have lost a lot of my enthusiasm.....

I chose case studies connected with the medical field as at my home institution we run an online nursing degree program. The program was developed a few years ago and I am aware that there are many new technologies (web 2.0) that might enhance the program by improving interactivity, providing more collaborative and reflective evaluation, and adding more challenging case scenarios.

Consequently I chose two case studies using e-portfolios, one on online assessment, and one about using Labyrinth - an authoring tool for creating virtual patient case scenarios. I am hoping to learn more about these tools and how they might be useful in my own context. On first reading the amount of investment required in time and resources suggests that I should be looking at implementing only one of these tools at a time!

Welcome to my new blog where hopefully I can post at will and share some thoughts and ideas. I must resist the temptation to play with the software and concentrate on course content!