01.10 The newsletter of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine, Spring 2006

Issues and news on learning and teaching in medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine

Print: ISSN 1740-8768

Online: ISSN 1479-523X

In this issue

ACETS/Breaking Boundaries 2005
Making practice based learning work
The eLearning themed issue

Other publication formats

This issue is also available as a low resolution PDF document suitable for printing.

Welcome!

We hope you have had a good start to 2006 and welcome you to the 10th edition of 01. In this newsletter we bring you conference reports from the ACETS Symposium/Breaking Boundaries 2005, held in Edinburgh in November. Deborah Murdoch-Eaton is the first in a series of National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) winners to be profiled, and we extend a warm welcome to two new members of staff.

We moved servers at Christmas, and offices on 2 February - with all the associated disruption!

We learn about a practice based learning FDTL4 project and the launch of a major European Interprofessional Education Network (EIPEN). In this eLearning themed issue, find out about Shibboleth from the IAMSECT project, as well as a range of exciting innovations including virtual radiography of a horse, and the pedagogic aspects of choosing Open Source Software over commercially based applications.This is complemented by a summary from Julian Cook’s review of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).

Hearty congratulations to Dr Rachel Ellaway and Dr David Dewhurst from the University of Edinburgh on their Queen’s Anniversary Award, and to all those honoured in the Queen’s New Year Honours list.

Suzanne Hardy

Goodbye and thanks to Andrew Short

Andrew Short left us at the start of this academic year to start his well earned retirement after a career that has contributed extensively to the development of veterinary education in the UK.

Andrew has worked with the Subject Centre since it’s inception in 2000, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank him publicly for all his hard work on the Centre’s behalf. We hope you have a restful and happy retirement Andrew!

Andrew nevertheless doesn’t get away from us that easily - he has agreed to continue to act as a Specialist Advisor from time to time....

Book token winners

We ran a competition linked to the evaluation forms from Breaking Boundaries 2005, to win £50 book tokens.

We are happy that both winners accepted their prizes, and hope that Dr Deborah White, University of Birmingham, and Sally Wilks, University of Plymouth, enjoy spending them.

Welcome to Jackie and Claire

The Subject Centre has been joined by two new secretarial staff in the form of Jackie Scorfield and Claire Sanderson.

Supporting both the Subject Centre and CETL4HealthNE, they are sure to be kept busy! Jackie and Claire joined the team within a couple of weeks of each other over the Christmas and New Year period. Some of you may already have had contact with either Jackie or Claire, by telephone or email, and we are sure those who haven’t will extend them both a warm welcome. In their Subject Centre guise, Claire and Jackie will both work in supporting the administration function, working closely with Sue Bruce (sue.bryce@ncl.ac.uk) to provide the vital underpinning of all of the Centre’s activity.

They can be contacted directly by email: claire.sanderson@ncl.ac.uk and jacqueline.scorfield@ncl.ac.uk, and can be reached on the Subject Centre’s main telephone line 0191 222 5888.

Professor Reg Jordan, the Subject Centre Director continues to be supported by Carol Storey, carol.storey@ncl.ac.uk 0191 246 4558.

The virtual hospital online Dr Rachel Ellaway and David Dewhurst, Professor of eLearning, Learning Technology Section, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, The University of Edinburgh
Conference report: ACETS Symposium Dr Rachel Ellaway and David Dewhurst, Professor of eLearning, Learning Technology Section, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, The University of Edinburgh
Conference report: Breaking Boundaries 2005 Nigel Purcell, Senior Educational Advisor, Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine
Workshop report: mobile and wireless networks Tom Roper, Information Resources Development Coordinator, Brighton & Sussex Medical School
Virtual radiography of the horse Caroline Boulocher, Unité Pédagogique d’Anatomie, Département des Animaux de Compagnie. Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon
National teaching fellow profile Deborah Murdoch-Eaton, Professor of Medical Education, University of Leeds
Shibboleth and clinical teaching Caroline Ingram, Jon Dowland, Cal Racey and Janet Wheeler, Part of the IAMSECT project team, University of Newcastle
Using CRANCS Dr Rachel Ellaway, Dr Helen Cameron and Dr Michael Ross, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine,The University of Edinburgh
Launch of EIPEN Dr Marion Helme, Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Health Sciences & Practice
Review of virtual learning environments in UK medical, dental and veterinary education: A summary of Special Report 6 Julian Cook, Learning technology advisor, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol
FDTL4 update: making practice based learning work Chris Turnock, Project Manager, Northumbria University
Miniproject report: developing a virtual learning environment for orthodontics Jonathan Sandy, Professor in Orthodontics & Dental Education Committee Chair, Department of Oral & Dental Science, University of Bristol; Dr Tony Ireland, Consultant Senior Lecturer in Orthodontics, Dental School, Bristol Royal Infirmary; Dr Dominic Alder, Project Co-ordinator Child Dental Health, Dental School, University of Bristol
Workshop report: Open Source VLEs - the next generation Paul Horner, School of Medical Education Development, University of Newcastle
Roundup of eLearning projects at Leeds School of Medicine Andy Pellow, IT Manager, School of Medicine, University of Leeds
Planning dissertations David Brigden, Regional Adviser for Postgraduate Medicine and Dental Education, Mersey Deanery, and Professor of Health Services Education, University of Liverpool; Mr Graham Lamont, Consultant Paediatric Surgeon, Deputy Postgraduate Dean, Mersey Deanery

The virtual hospital online

Rachel Ellaway and David Dewhurst, Professor of eLearning, Learning Technology Section,College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine,The University of Edinburgh

The eLearning platform for medicine and veterinary medicine at the University of Edinburgh has been awarded one of the prestigious 2005 Queen’s Anniversary Awards for Further and Higher Education.These awards, which are given every two years or so, are intended to recognise and champion innovation, excellence and impact on the wider community in the tertiary sector. Although the majority of the prizes are awarded for research, this award marks both the recognition of teaching and learning in medicine and veterinary medicine (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels) and the applied use of eLearning and learning technologies.

Developing the virtual hospital online (VHO)

The establishment of the Learning Technology Section in 1999 in what was then the Faculty Group of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh enabled embryonic ideas for a virtual learning environment for undergraduate medicine to be realised and resulted in the creation of ‘The Edinburgh Electronic Medical Curriculum’ (EEMeC). This was very much a partnership between LTS, staff in the Medical Teaching Organisation responsible for developing and delivering the curriculum, and academic and clinical staff who taught the course.

The early success of EEMeC led, a couple of years later, to the development of a system for undergraduate veterinary medicine ‘The Edinburgh Electronic Veterinary Curriculum’ (EEVeC) and a few years after that a system for all postgraduate students ‘The Edinburgh Electronic Postgraduate Portfolio’ (EEPoP) in the newly formed College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Over this period a range of common systems and services were developed, including those for courseware authoring and delivery, resource management, content management, space management and assessment management.

Aspects of the VHO platform have been developed and adapted further for other contexts. For instance, the VHO courseware authoring and delivery tool ‘EROS’ is the underlying system for the PathCAL series of online pathology and pathophysiology tutorials available through JISC Collections (see www.pathcal.ac.uk), and the resource management system component is actively being considered by the World Health Organisation’s ‘Health Academy’. Other adaptations include systems for postgraduate law students and a number of research projects.

The difference that makes the difference?

Many, if not most, universities now have online support systems (usually in the form of virtual or managed learning environments - VLEs and MLEs respectively), so what is it that marks the Edinburgh approach as unique and innovatory?

Constructive alignment: the VHO system has been developed inhouse, with particular attention paid to achieving close alignment with the needs of the different learning communities it serves.
The VHO system provides programme-wide support rather than individual course support. This allows the whole programme community to come together, share resources and tools and see what happens in other areas of the programme which may be closely related to their own teaching.
The initial and continuing developments of the system are determined by the communities they serve - students, teaching staff and course administrators. This ensures that the systems provide everything they need and nothing they don’t.
The VHO system forms integral scaffolds to the programmes it supports, each developing synergistically with the others. While some aspects are similar to standard VLEs, others are more akin to portals (bringing external services together), portfolios (personalised web pages, learner profiles, annotations and file storage), knowledgebases (content management, archives) and workflow management (assessment, evaluation and activity support).
Any successful new technology extends existing practice rather than replacing it outright. Using the VHO has meant less of a transition from offline to online teaching, to a better understanding of both and to a highly successful blend of the two in a number of different settings.

Where next?

The VHO is constantly being developed and extended. Upcoming work includes the development of tools for authoring and delivering game informed virtual patients using emerging data standards (Rachel is co-chair of the Medbiquitous Virtual Patient Working Group - all participants and contributors welcome) and better integration between the VHO and University’s commercial systems (such as student records, finance, WebCT, Questionmark Perception and Macromedia Breeze).

The three VLE systems which make up the VHO have a wide range of innovative, original and distinctive features, including:

extensive, personalised support for numerous roles
teaching event (e.g. lecture, project, practical) within the various degree programmes served databases that can be linked to other VHO objects such
extensive support for the creation of innovative, as participants, resources, locations and curricula data contextualised educational activities
learning objective and learning outcome mapping and
extensive support for communication (academic management tools discussion boards, targeted student noticeboards) and coordination (e.g. personalised timetables, common workspace tools to promote interaction between assets and tools supervisors and postgraduate students)
management of teaching, learning and assessment
extensive support for delivery of assessment
extensive support for content, resource and knowledge • management of summative assessment data and management formative assessment portfolios
a searchable, annotatable, editable content • tools for online creation of summative and formative management system with full editing management such assessments as versioning, document check in/out, differential editing
support for peer assessmentsanalysis and print to multiple formats (web, xml, rich text etc.)
tools to capture and record research profiles

Although the Queen’s Anniversary Prize has gone to the work undertaken in Edinburgh, the award clearly indicates the increasing importance and mainstream nature of online support for healthcare education. The success of the VHO can be taken as recognition of the key role of the online dimensions of our students’ lives, not just as a peripheral concern but as a fundamental part of 21st Century healthcare education.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the LTS development team for the Virtual Hospital Online, currently Jackie Aim, John Archer, Michael Begg, Stewart Cromar, Chris Downie,Steve Fox,Arek Juszczyk, Colin Macintosh, Clare Newlands and Lisa Sharpe, as well as all those who have contributed over the years.Thanks also to all the staff and students of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, in particular the staff of the Medical and Veterinary Teaching Organisations, and the many others who have supported the development of and contributed to the VHO over the years.

Links

EEMeC is online at www.eemec.med.ed.ac.uk and although it has restricted access there is a visitors centre. The other VHO systems are not accessible without a login. MVMLTS is at www.lts.mvm.ed.ac.uk.

Authors

Dr Rachel Ellaway is the eLearning Manager for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and a Subject Specialist Advisor in eLearning for the Subject Centre.

Professor David Dewhurst is the Assistant Principal for eLearning and eHealth and the Director of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine’s Learning Technology Section, at the University of Edinburgh.

For further information please contact rachel.ellaway@ed.ac.uk or david.dewhurst@ed.ac.uk.

ACETS Symposium

Dr Rachel Ellaway and David Dewhurst, Professor of eLearning Technology Section, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine,The University of Edinburgh

ACETS (Assemble, Catalogue, Exemplify,Test and Share) was a three-year project funded by the JISC as part of its Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme.

The aim was to investigate the ways in which teachers in HE and FE were able to adapt and reuse existing educational resources to develop teaching and learning activities to meet specific course needs.

To do this ACETS commissioned 21 teachers in a wide range of healthcare subjects and from a wide range of institutions to create case studies of what really happens when teachers engage with the many issues surrounding the reuse of third party digital content in their teaching. The findings of the ACETS project were disseminated through a Special Report 8: ISBN 0-7017-0197-8 and the ACETS Symposium 8-9 November 2005 which ran back to back with the Subject Centre’s Breaking Boundaries 2005 conference in Edinburgh. The ACETS Symposium brought together many of the teachers who contributed case studies and the project staff as well as interested members of the medical, dental and veterinary education community.

The Symposium opened with an overview of the project and then after lunch several of the teachers who had created the case studies presented their work and their thinking regarding the reuse of third party materials. Most thought that, although the process of reuse presented a number of difficulties, the experience had been both rewarding and effective and they intended to extend the use of the skills and techniques, they had developed through their participation in ACETS, in their future teaching activities. However, a major concern raised was the extent to which materials developed could then be shared with other institutions. In ACETS many of the case studies involved the reuse of commercial materials, the use of patient- identifiable material under limited terms of consent and in some cases involved substantial institutional investment, all of which militated against free and open sharing and exchange.

Dawn Leeder, one of the ACETS Project Managers, ran a workshop on specifying and designing reusable learning objects and the day ended with a poster display and reception. The Symposium reconvened the following morning with an extended discussion of the project’s findings. Discussion topics ranged from concerns about:

the concept of reusability being treated too dogmatically
the need for teachers’ needs to be addressed more directly
the importance of creativity and innovative pedagogical approaches
the need for appropriate levels of technical support and infrastructure.

A key issue was one of motivation and identified need, both of which were felt to be important in persuading teachers to engage in reusing existing materials in the first place. ACETS had provided the need and the motivation. Without these the group felt that teachers will be unlikely to overcome the many difficulties associated with using existing third party materials and therefore would be unlikely to benefit from the many advantages that reuse can offer. If reuse is to become part of mainstream practice then more support and a less problematic working environment is needed.

The symposium ended with a series of presentations which linked to the main themes of the follow-on Breaking Boundaries 2005. There was a strong feeling that the approach taken by ACETS had developed a robust qualitative and ethnographic research methodology to address specific research questions which could be usefully be adopted by other similar projects. The exemplar case studies provided a rich resource for teachers contemplating using third party resources.

The project website is at www.acets.ac.uk and a copy of the ACETS report is available online at www.acets.ac.uk/resources/acetspub.pdf

For further information please contact rachel.ellaway@ed.ac.uk or david.dewhurst@ed.ac.uk

Breaking Boundaries 2005

Nigel Purcell, Senior Educational Advisor, Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry & Veterinary Medicine

Enjoyable, challenging, relevant, worthwhile and valuable.These were typical of the words chosen by delegates to best describe Breaking Boundaries 2005 held 9-10 November at the Apex Hotel in Edinburgh.

The primary purpose was to showcase the immensely wide range of innovative development work which has been supported by the Subject Centre, particularly in the area of employability and to provide an opportunity for updating and networking.

The event was opened by Professor David Dewhurst from the University of Edinburgh, who outlined the key findings and outcomes of the ACETS project (the final event for the ACETS project had been held on the previous day and that morning at the same hotel). His presentation was then followed by Professor Reg Jordan, Director of the Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine. Professor Jordan outlined the context and drivers for change that are impacting on medical, dental and veterinary education and examined the kinds of responses and directions we need to consider.

The keynotes were followed by the first of the five parallel sessions. These covered a wide range of topics including ePedagogy, evaluation of chairside teaching, authentication and authorisation, peer assisted learning, clinical skills and anatomy teaching. The second parallel sessions included Inter-Professional Learning (IPL) and mental health teaching, arts and humanities in the curriculum, evaluation of chair-side teaching, virtual patients, repositories & metadata and small projects. The format of each of these sessions was itself varied. For example the small projects session provided an opportunity for six of our miniproject holders to showcase their findings and project outcomes.

Dinner in the evening was held in the hotel top floor restaurant which gave us a glorious panoramic view of the castle. Of course, a key purpose of such events is networking, but one couple took this further than usual by purchasing an engagement ring in Edinburgh earlier in the day (missing one of the sessions to do so!), giving a whole new meaning to the remit to engage with the constituency!

Thanks to all the staff (and the rubber duck) at the Apex Hotel www.apexhotels.co.uk

On the following day, the keynotes given covered the potentially very significant implications for of current developments in the Bologna process for harmonising degrees across the EU; the latest information on the UMAP project for developing a database of medical education exam questions; consent for clinical recordings and IPR and Creative Commons.

There were two more parallel sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, again covering a variety of topics. Sessions offered covered topics such as IPR, reflection, professionalism/employability, widening participation, assessment, communication skills, staff development and leadership. An especially popular session was held in the afternoon on the use of mobile/wireless devices in education. The final keynote was delivered by Professor Michael Wilkes, the Vice Dean of Medical Education, University of California, Davis, who gave valuable insights into the issues currently facing clinical educators in the US and the UK.

As always we aimed to collect in as many evaluations as we could and the results were overwhelmingly positive. We held a prize draw for those submitting evaluations and the two lucky winners each received a £50 voucher.

Delegate comments...

good mix of plenaries and workshops
good focus on learning and teaching rather than technologies
great way to network
all sessions attended useful and interesting
good group of people
good to learn we are doing the right things

Thanks to the Higher Education Academy employability project, and all the CETL, FDTL and JISC projects who sponsored Breaking Boundaries 2005.

For further information please contact nigel.purcell@ncl.ac.uk

Mobile and wireless networks

Tom Roper, Information Resources Development Co-ordinator, Brighton & Sussex Medical School

Thom Proven, a third year medical student at the Brighton & Sussex Medical School, was among the presenters at a workshop on mobile and wireless devices in medical education at Breaking Boundaries 2005 in Edinburgh.

Thom described his experience of using a handheld, provided to a volunteer group of twenty students as part of BSMS’s PDA project, and told the workshop how it had enhanced his learning. Inam Haq, also of BSMS, presented the results of the project so far, showing how handhelds can be a valuable learning tool for convenient, user friendly learning support and presented data from a cross-section survey of learning resource use among first and second year students. Mark Packer gave the strategic, technical and historical background to the PDA project, as well as describing the next phase, in which handhelds will be offered to the whole third year, for use in a clinical setting.

The workshop also heard from Vivien Sieber of Oxford’s RAMBLE (Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments) project, funded by JISC as part of the DEL eTools for Learners and Teachers programme. In RAMBLE, fifth year medical students on an obstetrics and gynaecology rotation, and also first year chemists, used mobile blogging to record personal reflections on their learning, the resulting blogs being integrated with their electronic learning environment. ...a useful learning tool rather than an introspective indulgence... one participant commented.

Finally Sarah Sutton, Clinical Librarian at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, discussed their use of handhelds for junior doctors.

The workshop was full to bursting, and questions from the audience showed a high level of interest in the use of handhelds in the undergraduate medical curriculum; with other schools mentioning projects in development.

BSMS PDA project: www.bsms.ac.uk/news/newspages/11_05pda_edinburgh.htm

RAMBLE project: ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk

Leicester project: www.le.ac.uk/li/lgh/library/palm.htm

For further information please contact tom@roper.org.uk or c.t.roper@bms.ac.uk

Virtual radiography of the horse

*Caroline Boulocher, Unité Pédagogique d’Anatomie, Département des Animaux de Compagnie. Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon*

The Virtual Radiography of the Horse is an interactive diagnostic imaging website that aims to illustrate radiographic techniques and create a digital bank of normal equine radiographs with anatomical features highlighted available on line at www.3d-it.vet.ed.ac.uk/xrayhandbook/

The text is based on the Equine Radiography Handbook 2004, used to teach radiographic techniques of the horse at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, Edinburgh.

Standard normal radiographs are complemented by three-dimensional movies based on tomodensitometry data, using a software more normally used for surgical planning in human medicine, the Robin’s 3D software. Details about its workstation and use in human medicine can be found at www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/mgi/workstat.htm

This software was primarily developed for maxillo-facial surgery, but has applications in orthopaedic and other human surgery. The 3D workstation allows a wide variety of interaction such as cutting, repositioning and joining procedures on the 3D data, which will have been acquired from CT, MRI or even 3D ultrasound. The area is chosen using the horse map and clicking on the desired part.

However until now only the carpus of the horse has been fully developed in 3D. The technique of the carpus radiography is described with pictures from front and side of a standing horse (to get the three- dimensional aspect of the positioning) and the normal radiographs expected are provided as a reference. All the views currently used are described and annotated in addition to the pictures.

Each bone of the carpus can be studied for each of the radiographic views, using transparent or solid 3 dimensional views of this bone highlighted in color. The corresponding 3D movies show a 360° rotation of the carpus and they can be paused in any angle to correlate it to the radiographic projection of interest. Then the movie can be paused and, using separate open-windows on the screen, positioned side by side to its corresponding radiographs with the bone in the same color. This comparison and the use of the rotation help to understand how the superimposed structures give the radiographic image, as well as the anatomic structure of the carpus.

The association of three-dimensional reconstructions and radiographs is a new approach to teaching in veterinary medicine as is the use of medical reconstructive software for educational purpose. This work has been the subject of the author’s French DVM thesis La Radiographie Virtuelle du cheval, the detail of which can be accessed at: www.medev.ac.uk/dinky?dinky_id=461

Further work based on CT scan and 3D imaging has also been done on the horse head and foot. The surgical modalities of the software even allow for simulating laminitis. It is still work on process but some examples can already be seen clicking on the word Gallery from the page www.3d-it.vet.ed.ac.uk

The author would like to acknowledge Gill McConnell, Regine Hagen, Andrew Short and Mairi Frame. The author is now at the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon and a collaboration between the author, the Royal Dick School of Veterinary Studies and the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon is planned to bring an extension to this project for further interactive movies of the head of the horse in 3D and wobbling radiographs.

For further information please contact c.boulocher@vet-lyon.fr

National teaching fellow profile

This is the first of a series of interviews with National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) winners.We start our series with Deborah Murdoch-Eaton, Professor of Medical Education, University of Leeds.

What is your background?

I trained in the London area and came to Leeds in 1991 for my academic senior registrar post. Found I was a tutor and actually in charge of the Undergraduate course! This sparked my interest in teaching, and my first medical education publication in 1994. I took up a newly created post in 1995 working jointly in the medical school and as a paediatrician. I was promoted to a personal chair from 2002, while continuing to work as lead in the regional neurorehabilitation team for children following acquired brain injury.

Who was your most influential teacher?

I think I would have to say Professor Dame June Lloyd who I worked for at Great Ormond Street. She was the absolute exemplar of a role model, who demonstrated the same courtesy, professionalism and kindness to all, from patients through to the junior staff and her colleagues. She always managed to incorporate teaching into the busy ward rounds, and aimed it multiprofessionally (before this became trendy) as well as including the child and family in the discussion. And she did all this while ensuring that the ward round business was done, and being sufficiently scary that you made sure you read up on what she had asked you to! She never forgot to follow up on areas she had asked you about - another good teaching role model developing interest in students and keeping them motivated.

What is your NTFS about?

Getting the best out of students. I have a long standing interest in the development of life-long learning skills in our students and have developed and researched this through the SSC programme in Leeds, appraisal and evaluating development of generic/transferable skills. The unusual thing about a NTF award is that it is really regarded as a reward with few strings attached, and though you have a project(s) in mind, the use of the money is flexible. I’ve got a lot of projects in mind for the next few years, the current one is to investigate how different generic skills are on entry to medical school in Sudan where I am involved in working with medical schools to update their curricula. Apart from the fascination of the potential influences of differing school experience and culture on learning, it’s really intriguing to consider local applicability of educational practice and how direct importation of our western models may not be wholly appropriate.

Has the NTFS award had any unintended consequences?

I think the part I am enjoying most is the stimulation from interacting with a wide range of academics from different disciplines, who may approach issues from an angle you had not even considered. NTFs have a potential to have valuable influence and input into the Higher Education Academy - it would be a real pity if the Academy did not take full advantage of this identified body of enthusiasts.

What are you reading now?

A number of books to help me understand better the influences in Africa, where I am hoping to get more involved in medical education projects. I was born and brought up in Zimbabwe, which may or may not help!

Africa is a dynamic continent full of controversy. Currently I am immersed in Nugent’s Africa since Independence, and Johnson’s The Root causes of Sudan’s civil wars. And to keep me sane, there is also this months’ book club bit of fluff!

What do you think are the trends in education?

Rigour in assessment, including evaluation of competence in the workplace. Sustainable assessment is one that actually changes practice not just hurdle jumping. I also hope this incorporates developing the truly critically reflective practitioner able to cope with a changing work environment.

What are the challenges?

Coping with the volume of medical students without losing the ability to treat them as individuals. We have become so obsessed with assessment and detecting the poorly performing student, that sometimes I think we have forgotten that the majority of students doing just fine, and our obligation / pleasure to help them achieve not just good enough but absolutely the best they can.

Have you any advice for new teachers?

See above - spend just as much effort in getting the best out of students and stimulating them to achieve their potential as reaching the required level of competence.

What are your 5 desert island learning and teaching resources?

Does your imagination count as one? Thinking outside the box to think of a different way to engage students, or teach something you have done many times in a way that keeps you interested and thus much more likely to deliver a good session. I doubt if any technology would be of benefit on the desert island as you could draw on the sand! I might also take Eraut’s Developing Professional Knowledge & Competence because every time I dip into it, I take away something new. Ditto Brookfield’s Developing Critical Thinkers.

For further information please contact: d.g.murdoch-eaton@leeds.ac.uk

Shibboleth and clinical teaching

Caroline Ingram, Jon Dowland, Cal Racey and Janet Wheeler, part of the IAMSECT project team, University of Newcastle

Managing access to restricted web resources, logins and passwords is a complex problem. It is hard for developers to find a general solution even within an institution due to the wide variety of infrastructure and procedures that might be in place. Inter-institutional sharing of resources is becoming more in demand from tutors and institutions and introduces further problems. Shibboleth technology has been suggested as the ideal solution for both.

What is Shibboleth and why do we need to know about it?

Identity management is one of the major issues facing Internet and online resource users. How do you prove to a website that you are who you say you are? And how do you do this securely enough to prevent someone else being able to get that information and convince the website that they are you?

Shibboleth is a piece of software, produced in the US, which concentrates on trust management. In Higher Education that means trust of individuals within the community who work or study in institutions, and also between the community and the services provided by, for example, academic publishers. Each individual in the community is part of an institution (university, college), and this institution will collect and store pieces of information about the individual. The information about the individual (i.e. that held by the institution) is separate from the information about a resource (i.e. that held by the publisher). This makes it possible to make the information about the individual anonymous in many cases, as most publishers only need to know that a user is a member of an institution if a valid licence for access exists. The purpose of Shibboleth is to provide a secure and verifiable channel for the transfer of information about the individual from the institution to the publisher. This is slightly more complicated than it sounds, and particularly for clinical teaching, there is a proverbial goldmine of privacy and confidentiality issues.

Users should not know that Shibboleth is handling information about them, as it operates as a piece of middleware, connecting machines which store information about users to machines which want to use that information to verify the access/rights a user can have to a service. Shibboleth, however, is not an authentication or a single sign on (SSO) system, although it is designed to have these plugged in, it is just one of many components needed to build a federated identity management solution.

What is IAMSECT doing?

Funded by the JISC Core Middleware Programme, the Interinstitutional Authorisation Management to Support eLearning with reference to Clinical Teaching (IAMSECT) project is developing, testing and disseminating a practical approach for implementing interinstitutional authentication and authorisation management services, using Shibboleth, for eLearning.

The project is shared between the Universities of Durham and Newcastle and other stakeholders in the northeast region, and represents partnerships between central services and the clinical teaching subject area which has particular authorisation needs and difficulties. The partners are learning, and contributing to knowledge about Shibboleth, by testing practical approaches, and identifying and documenting the issues to help to guide other institutions in their uptake of Shibboleth as an alternative to some Athens services.

How does Shibboleth work?

Attributes, or pieces of descriptive information about a user, are the key to the way Shibboleth authorises user access to resources. Shibboleth uses information about a user to determine whether they will be granted access privileges. To illustrate this, currently the most common access decisions in use with Shibboleth would read:

User A is a member of university X and can access journal Q because university X bought rights to journal Q

User B is a member of university Y and can’t access journal Q because university Y hasn’t bought rights to journal Q

Attributes will be exchanged about a prospective user until the controlled resource has sufficient information to make a decision about allowing access. It is easy to envisage

Shibboleth being used to facilitate much more complicated access decisions than those given above; i.e. a case in which only medical students taking the pathology course, who are enrolled for more than 2 years, can access autopsy photographs. This type of complex attribute can be termed a medic restrict attribute, which is relatively easy to ascertain for students as their course will dictate their access rights.

However, for staff the situation is much more problematical, as they may have multiple identities and picked their own email (not necessarily .ac.uk), or may come from outside a university, i.e. NHS staff. Better, more consistent, information about staff is required. This is currently an issue and it may require changes in institutional administrative practices in order to collect and make available requisite attributes in this context.

How is this being applied?

At Durham, a development version of the Blackboard VLE has been modified to accept access via Shibboleth. When this is put into production, it will allow students at Newcastle to be authorised to access Blackboard using their Newcastle credentials -Durham will not need to maintain usernames and passwords for them but will be able to control access. The Faculty of Medical Sciences at Newcastle has gone one stage further in that a Clinical Education Masters degree, using an in-house virtual learning environment, is being accessed via Shibboleth.

In conclusion, there are difficulties in setting up all the components that Shibboleth needs to operate effectively. However, once these have been overcome, a robust authentication and authorisation solution can be offered, which as real advantages for sharing resources and students between institutions.

For further information please contact j.e.wheeler@ncl.ac.uk or caroline@csiconsultancy.co.uk

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of all of the IAMSECT team members in working towards these solutions.

Using CRANCS

Dr Rachel Ellaway, Dr Helen Cameron and Dr Michael Ross, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine,The University of Edinburgh

Clinical recordings (such as images, videos and scans) have long been one of the mainstays of healthcare education. In recent years this has increasingly meant the use of digital recordings, often accessed online.The ability to duplicate and transmit clinical recordings has changed almost beyond recognition. However, frameworks and guidelines to support clinicians and teachers in the use of clinical recordings have changed more slowly, and as a result it is increasingly questionable as to whether some recordings can continue to be used.

CHERRI-PIE

In the summer of 2005, as a result of both their developing interest in supporting clinical education and developing parts of the common UK Information Environment, the JISC commissioned a team based at the University of Edinburgh to undertake a study on the practicalities of sharing and exchanging clinical recordings in support of teaching and research in the UK. This resulting project, Common Healthcare Educational Recordings Reusability Infrastructure - Practice, Interoperability and Ethics (CHERRI-PIE), has carried out surveys of existing practice, the medico-legal context, and developed a consent and licensing model that it is anticipated will meet the needs of those concerned.

Current practice

Despite UK-wide data protection and human rights legislation, and guidance from bodies such as the GMC, current practice regarding the acquisition and use of clinical recordings for academic non-clinical settings (CRANCS) in the UK is highly varied. For some, the process stops at acquiring informed consent and the recording, others try and log subsequent usage while many, faced with uncertainty and risk of litigation have stopped using CRANCS altogether.

The problem is a combination of:

a lack of common process and standards
a lack of connection between terms of consent and subsequent use
unnecessary duplication in local contexts as safety measure
an overall sense of risk and concern that is leading to great anxiety and loss of utility.

And the problem does not stop at consent; there are often conflicting or unclear issues of ownership and copyright. Although the NHS asserts ownership of all recordings acquired in its clinical environments this has yet to be tested in law.

CHERRI C+LM Model

The two technical issues are therefore ones of consent and ownership. Whatever solution is applied needs to accommodate both of these issues. CHERRI has developed a conceptual Consent and Licensing model (or C+LM) that does integrate the two to provide a solution that addresses both the uncertainty and disconnectedness of current practice.

C+LM licensing needs to be simple and easy to understand. It is recommended that it follows the same kind of model as used by Creative Commons (see creativecommons.org) and provisional discussions have taken place regarding the creation of Clinical Commons licenses.

This illustrates a situation where a patient (possibly with their guardian or other family members) is seen by a physician who requests that a recording is taken.The consent is taken either by the physician or the recorder (who might be a photographer or the physician).A licence is also drawn up and is linked to the consent in perpetuity through use of a shared globally unique identifier (GUID) which encodes the identity of the patient and is maintained securely by the healthcare provider.The licence describes the conditions of consent and use and is made available along with the recording for non- clinical use.Within each use context there may be those who use the recording (such as teachers) or those who support users (such as technical staff). Because the recording and its licence are not separated they can be passed from one use context to another with impunity as the conditions under which the recording can be used are known and expressed in a commonly understood format. In addition, the consent, recording and/or licence can be entered into the patient record or made available to the patient, as would be necessary following a data access request.

Conclusions

Although CHERRI-PIE has developed a solution to the problems associated with acquiring and using CRANCS we are still a long way from its implementation. For this system to work it would need to become common practice in the NHS and tertiary education, a major undertaking in its own right. However, there is a real and current problem with the acquisition and use of CRANCS that needs to be addressed before their utility becomes any more threatened. There is at least one way now of solving the problem.

For further information please see www.cherri.mvm.ed.ac.uk or contact rachel.ellaway@ed.ac.uk

Launch of EIPEN: European Interprofessional Education Network in health and social care

Dr Marion Helme, Project Coordinator, Higher Education Academy Health Sciences & Practice

In 2005 the Health Sciences & Practice Subject Centre, in collaboration with the Subject Centres for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine and Social Policy and Social Work, successfully applied for funding from the Leonardo da Vinci Programme to establish a European Network for promoting and sharing practice in Interprofessional Education.

EIPEN was launched on November 15 at a celebration lunch in King’s College London, after the first meeting of the Steering Group. The celebration lunch was attended by representatives from the fifteen partners from six EC countries, Higher Education Academy staff and invited guests from the UK IPE community, with a speech by Professor Hugh Barr.

EIPEN members at the first meeting of the Steering Group Partners in EIPEN include:

GREECE

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The Greek Health Informatics Association, Athens

FINLAND

The University and the Polytechnic of Oulu
Department of Mental Health Services, Oulu
The Friends of the Young Association, Oulu

HUNGARY

Szechenyi Istvan University, Györ
United Institute of Health and Social Care, Györ

POLAND

Dept of Hygiene and Ecology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Occupational Medicine Centre of the Malopolska Region

SWEDEN

Karolinska Institute, Stockholm
Centre for General Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm
The Primary Health Care Board, Stockholm County Council

UK

Higher Education Academy Subject Centres in health and social care
Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education (CAIPE)
Creating an Interprofessional Workforce
Steve Crane Consulting Ltd

EIPEN has two interlinked aims:

to develop a transnational network of universities and employers in the six participating countries
to promote good practice in interprofessional education in health and social care.

Promotional material and a programme of events is being developed by partners. If you would like to be kept informed of developments please register your interest by emailing triple-ltsn@kcl.ac.uk, including EIPEN INFO in the subject line. For further information please contact marion.helme@kcl.ac.uk

Review of virtual learning environments in UK medical, dental and veterinary education: a summary of Special Report 6

Julian Cook, Learning technology advisor, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol

A Review of Virtual Learning Environments in UK Medical,Dental and Veterinary Education was commissioned by the Subject Centre and published in August 2005 as an electronic publication (ISBN 0 7017 0186 2).The review is an update of the JTAP-623 report carried out in 2001. It presents responses to two questionnaires (targeted at academics and developers) circulated in August/September 2004, as well as comments collected at workshops in May 2004.This article is a summary of the findings and recommendations of the review.

Summary

Questionnaire responses from a knowledgeble academic and an educational technologist/developer from each medical, dental and veterinary school were sought and views from participants at an eLearning workshop were collected. Forty five schools responded (23 medical, 9 dental and 7 veterinary schools), plus there were six anonymised responses. These data show that almost half of schools are using a commercial rather than a bespoke VLE, although bespoke systems are still felt to be more suitable for clinical programmes.

Overall usage of VLEs has increased greatly in four years.
There has been development of VLEs towards personalisation and integration with other systems, mainly through moves towards single-sign-on (SSO), although there is still work to do in this respect.
A minority of schools are actively involved in sharing content (mainly questions and interactive materials) and to a lesser extent system code and components. This is mainly done within formal projects and associations.
The teams supporting VLEs vary enormously in terms of their size and skill sets.
Although there has been a broadening in the range of activities carried out with VLEs, their core function is still delivery of course and administrative information.
There is still insufficient data about how VLEs are affecting teaching and learning practice, although there is a strong belief that they are important in supporting students in practice, mainly by improving contact with central services and quality monitoring.

Recommendations

Hosting institutions

Where an institution’s medical/dental/veterinary school is using their institutional VLE, control of the VLE structure should be devolved as far as possible to the schools to allow schools to modify the VLE for their needs. Medical schools
Schools (or hosting institutions) should audit their local support teams and evaluate their suitability for implementing their eLearning/VLE strategy. Results should be published in order for the community as a whole to develop models of effective support.
Schools relying on single individuals to develop/support their VLE should consider an expansion of their support teams and acquiring staff with relevant specialist skills.
Schools are able to share developments and some sharing and exchanging good practice has taken place, particularly when collaboration is facilitated by external funding such as FDTL or JISC. Sharing can be as effective between same-course in different institutions, or different-courses in the same institution.
Schools considering their future VLE strategy should keep an eye on developments towards integration and interoperability, and consider the potential benefits of a hybrid solution rather than a single all-encompassing VLE.

All developers

Developers (particularly those working with or considering hybrid solutions) should prioritise the implementation of true SSO where this is available locally.
Continue to work to allow modular integration between applications rather than development of all- encompassing VLEs.
Systems should be developed so that they are linkable at quite a deep level and integrated so that the user is unaware that they are using a different system.
Developers should analyse the tool integration models that are effective and be willing to share these with the development community.

Developers of bespoke systems

Continue to add value to medical VLEs through development of health-education specific applications and tools.
Work towards further development of personalised learning environments.
Demonstrate in detail how bespoke VLEs represent the curriculum better than a commercial or open source VLE could.

Funders/stakeholders

Evaluation work should be funded into:

How successful sharing of content has been in terms of how shared content is used and which kind of content is most popular.
More specifically, how are RLOs used by different institutions. To what extent are RLOs used across institutions? How far can they be designed to facilitate local modification?
Furthermore feasibility studies should be carried out into sharing of learning processes.

Further research should be funded into:

How communication tools have helped to support students on placement and engender an on-line community.
This would best be done as a set of case studies.
Give further consideration to the type of RLOs that could be shared.
Developing models of VLE/eLearning support in medical schools and their hosting institutions, and evaluating the effectiveness of these.
Further projects should be funded to support and encourage sharing of content.

Finally and most importantly, research is urgently needed into the true impact of VLEs on the practice of health education and on the experience of students and staff.

The full review can be downloaded as a PDF from: www.medev.ac.uk/docs/cook_vle/cook_vle_final.pdf

For further information please contact jules.cook@bris.ac.uk

FDTL4 update:

Making practice based learning work

Chris Turnock, Project Manager, Northumbria University

Do you:

Supervise students who learn in the workplace?
Deliver courses to prepare people for supervising students in the workplace?
Learn in the workplace?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then there is a website is for you. www.practicebasedlearning.org

The Making Practice Based Learning Work project has developed a website that aims to enhance the quality of student experiences whilst on work- based placements. Key parts are the learning materials and resource sections containing materials that can be used by anyone involved in many aspects of practice based student supervision, including supervisor preparation and support. These resources were either commissioned by the project or externally sourced web materials have been peer reviewed. The materials are freely available for anyone to use in enhancing the nature of practice education.

The problem

Successful practice-based learning needs practitioners able to recognise learning opportunities and able to communicate their professional knowledge. Many practitioners have not acquired the necessary language to describe their practices and need opportunities to help them in preparation for sharing their practice. Supervision can be one medium for learning such skills, but has mixed success in health care settings. This may be because it is often seen as an add-on activity resulting from insufficient numbers of suitably experienced and prepared staff expected to cope with clinical workloads that often fail to reflect their educational responsibilities (Spouse, 2001).

The proposed solution

The Making Practice Based Learning Work aimed to:

Enhance the professional development of the practice educator thereby maximising the learning experiences of health and social care students undertaking practice.

The project’s objectives were to:

Identify and collate evidence from a range of health care disciplines on how practitioners are prepared for their educational role in supporting student learning during clinical placement.
Identify practitioners’ needs in the provision, support and supervision of practice based learning.
Agree on principles of good practice that meet the identified needs.
Design, pilot and implement an open learning (including eLearning) and communication resource to enhance practitioner awareness and understanding of good practice.
Prepare, pilot and implement the learning resource for culturally diverse health and social care teams.
Disseminate and embed the project outcomes in a planned and comprehensive manner within and across health and social care disciplines.

The project has had three distinct phases.

Phase one

The project commissioned staff from participating universities (Ulster, Northumbria and Bournemouth) to produce a case study for each of the five disciplines involved in the project, namely, dietetics, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and radiography. These case studies involved an audit of the practice undertaken by Universities throughout the UK and Ireland on the methods used to prepare practitioners for their educational role in supporting students during practice placements. The audit commenced in September 2003 and was completed in January 2004. The project team also held regional events in the North East and South in December 2003 to analyse development of good practice in the educational preparation of practice based supervisors.

The findings of the case studies included examples of good practice that emerged from both the audit and regional events. For example, courses for preparing practice educators conformed to professional requirements. Examples of practice educator preparation courses that were either shared by disciplines or by institutions emerged in several case studies. All case studies identified the use of inter- professional learning activity, though this was normally in the classroom rather than practice settings. The case studies all felt the role of the practice educator needed greater formal recognition and more resources to enhance the status of the practice educator.

Phase two

The Phase One case studies were used by the project team to inform development of materials, which can be used by practitioners to make them more effective at helping students learn whilst on placement in the workplace. The materials cover various aspects of the educational role of the practitioners supervising students on practice placements. The materials have been divided into two sections, Learning Materials and Resources.

The Learning Materials section contains a variety of materials that were commissioned by the Making Practice Based Learning Work project. The materials came from a range of professionals in various health and social care and educational establishments throughout the UK. These materials utilise a range of presentation media, including text and video. The project team supported enhancement of these materials prior to being made available on the project website. At present there are ten items:

supporting dyslexic students in practice
failure to fail
preparing new registrants for teaching in practice
introduction to reflection in practice
facilitating learning in practice
managing learning environments
communication skills workbook
learning & assessing through reflection
skills for facilitating placement learning
mentoring

The Resources section contains external links categorised into the following themes:

learning and teaching in practice
supporting learning in practice
assessment in practice
inter-professional learning in practice
reflection in practice
diversity in practice
generic skills

These resources were identified through consultation with a range of stakeholders and quality assured by a panel of evaluators, whose details can be found at: www.medev.ac.uk/dinky?dinky_id=460

The evaluation teams included practitioners, academics and experts in the themed areas.

Phase three

The project team published the materials on the project website in the latter half of 2005, with an official launch of the materials taking place at Northumbria University on 16th September 2005.

The materials are available to you to use either for your own personal development or in the development and education of co-workers or students.

We are keen to receive feedback from you on these learning materials, and an online evaluation form can be found on the project website, located within the horizontal navigation bar.

Conclusion

Whilst the work of the project team has focused on five health disciplines, much of the material contained within the project website are generic in nature. This means that the materials are pertinent to other health care disciplines that require students to undergo supervised placements. In addition, the materials can also used in various approaches inter-professional education, particularly when learning takes place in the workplace.

Furthermore, the project team has secured additional funding to evaluate the transferability of the materials into a non-health care context. This work will be undertaken during 2006 in collaboration with a number of university departments delivering Sports Sciences degrees that contain a student placement component. Partners include Plymouth University, Sheffield Hallam University and Westminster University. The evaluation formally commences in February 2006.

The project team also intends to put in place measures that will promote maintenance of the project website, which includes identification of unavailable external links, replace unavailable links with link to new location and inclusion of appropriate new external links suggested by persons completing the online evaluation form.

The commissioned authors and the project staff have sought to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the content and the information contained in each resource, but do not warrant that it is accurate, complete or up to date and we accept no liability for any use made out of any of the resources.The learning resources are intended only for general and information purposes.

There is no charge made for use of any of these materials. Permission is granted to reproduce the materials for personal or education use only, however sources should be acknowledged when used, as in usual academic practice. Commercial copying, hiring or lending is prohibited.

For further information please contact chris.turnock@northumbria.ac.uk

Miniproject report: Developing a virtual learning environment for orthodontics

Jonathan Sandy, Professor in Orthodontics & Dental Education Committee Chair, Department of Oral & Dental Science, University of Bristol; Dr Tony Ireland, Consultant Senior Lecturer in Orthodontics, Dental School, Bristol Royal Infirmary; Dr Dominic Alder, Project Co-ordinator Child Dental Health, Dental School, University of Bristol

Since October 2002, the University of Bristol has been developing a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to complement the taught doctorate (DDS) in orthodontics. (See 01.6 October 2004, page 13).

The aim of the VLE was to maximise the efficiency of learning for both trainees and their supervisors. Current pressures on clinical academics include the new consultant contract, the RAE in 2008 and the European Working Time Directive. For trainees in Specialist Registrar (SpR) posts, compliance with Junior Doctor’s hours means that travel time is part of work time. As a result of these issues we have developed a VLE available as a national academic resource for postgraduate orthodontic courses throughout the country which has exceeded all initial hopes and expectations.

Update

Following a meeting of Training Programme Directors in Orthodontics in December 2004, the National Orthodontics Programme was launched. An updated resource of 40 online learning modules and a series of assessments will be made available to each UK dental school. The modules from the programme have been allocated to each school for either first-drafting or peer-review. This has allowed us to recruit specialists in each field across the UK to revise the programme. It will be at the discretion of each dental school as to how they use the resource.

Videoconferencing

Aside from the National Programme, we have continued to develop the videoconferencing link between Bristol and our SpR bases in Portsmouth and Dorchester. One to one tutorials have been very successful and received positive feedback. We have improved this facility with new software and acoustic curtains to reduce the echo in our teaching room.

Virtual learning environment

A new Blackboard VLE has been created specifically for the national programme, and to date nearly 250 accounts have been allocated to UK for orthodontics

SpRs and their supervisors. The national VLE has all the features of the existing Bristol resource, including online feedback, discussion boards and announcements. A British Orthodontic Society Foundation Award (BOSF) has funded a project co-ordinator to develop the VLE.

The modules will be added to the national VLE as they are completed. They will be available as a PDF file but also as an interactive web tutorial that offers the student self-test questions with feedback and excellent navigation. Each module will contain additional reading, lecture material and assessments in addition to the core content and we will be collecting structured feedback from each user.

We hope that the discussion board on the National Blackboard course will become a popular tool and may become a method of assessment. Users will be a mouse-click away from speaking to the entire postgraduate orthodontics community and will hopefully engage in broad discussion.

Online assessment

As part of the national VLE, one of our Senior SpRs is collating a question bank which can be used to generate a series of online assessments. We are currently assessing software and methods of delivering these assessments.

The learning experience

The BOSF Award enabled us to look at methods to further develop the learning experience. Jonathan and Tony have developed a web-based clinical techniques tutorial that contains a series of narrated video clips. Created in-house and designed as a prologue to the postgraduate course, the tutorial gives an overview of every stage of orthodontic treatment from diagnosis and photography to retainer useage. It will hopefully act as a successful foundation for a newly recruited SpR. Designed to complement the modules, we have also produced several easy to use video lectures for SpRs to view through the VLE. For example, the ICT module consists of six lectures presented by Dr John Turner of Birmingham Dental School.

Technology is rapidly becoming more important in an SpR’s training. Therefore, we have also made interactive software tutorials for access via the VLE. Using screen-capture software, we have recorded the process of using a program and have developed the recording into a fully interactive animated guide that can be navigated by the user. This acts as an excellent introduction to using software.

Exceeding expectations

We intend to start formal evaluation of the National Orthodontics Programme later this year to monitor the impact it has on teaching for both SpRs and supervisors. The VLE itself will also be constantly updated with news and details of the Programme.

Our initial £5,000 award from the Subject Centre was to develop a VLE for use in the Bristol DDS course. The project has been more successful than we ever imagined, and is now being developed as a unique national academic resource.

For further information please contact: jonathan.sandy@bris.ac.uk, tony.ireland@bris.ac.uk or dominic.alder@bris.ac.uk

Workshop report: Open Source VLEs - The Next Generation

Paul Horner, School of Medical Education Development, University of Newcastle

Paul Horner attended a Higher Education Academy briefing on Open Source VLEs, on behalf of the Subject Centre in December 2005 in York.The meeting was not intended to look at the technical issues of developing Open Source platforms and tools, but at the way such software can be developed and used to support teaching to enrich the student learning experience.

Derek Morrison, Head of eLearning, Higher Education Academy, opened the day posing a question - Open Source Software - disruptive technology? With more than 100,000 Open Source projects on Sourceforge alone, students (and academic staff/institutions) have a greater level of access to technologies which would previously been unavailable to them. Students are beginning to use tools from outside their institution e.g. blogs. This is disrupting the current status quo and in turn changing the outlook of modern educational establishments. To succeed, VLEs can no longer be a single entity and must consist of a multitude of elements. Morrison concluded by suggesting that an institution must decide whether it wishes to provide a learning environment, or a learning management system. In so doing, it doesn’t actually matter if the resource chosen is Open Source or otherwise, as long as it fits with the pedagogical requirements of the institution.

The first keynote speaker was Randy Metcalfe from JISC Open Source Software (OSS) Watch who talked about OSS and the VLE. There were three key points raised:

Open Source technology is both viable and cost effective. It is developed by professionals, not amateurs (as is often believed) and the support available, although often as costly as proprietary products, is usually of the highest standards.
Open Source is not a panacea - it doesn’t solve all problems, just as commercial software doesn’t.
Institutions should choose the best solution for their needs, whether Open Source or otherwise.

Although OSS is about more than just the licence (freedom, community etc.) it is defined by the licence used, and there are 58 OSI certified licences available.

There are three main considerations an institution must take into account before rolling out any VLE (whether Open Source or not):

Procurement - it is difficult to compare Open Source with Proprietary software.
Deployment - it is imperative that serious planning is undertaken before rolling out any software.
Support - many Open Source developers offer support packages as a way of funding the development of their products.

Oleg Liber presented a Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) perspective as the second keynote: Personal Learning Environments, Shifting the Locus of Control.

The world is changing, and with it education is changing. There has been a huge increase in the numbers of students entering further and higher education, and in turn the student experience is rapidly evolving. Focus is moving away from the traditional lecture/tutorial based approach towards distance and electronic learning. VLEs may be a product of this change or may even have helped this change occur more rapidly.

Universities have been able to implement VLEs relatively easily because traditionally they have experience of managing big systems. VLEs have succeeded within universities because they enable access to learning information via Content Management Systems (CMS), have proven to be cost effective, provide increased access for the growing number of students requiring remote access, and have clearly met pedagogical requirements.

Universities have traditionally resisted disruptive technologies. For example, the Open University is the only major academic institution that has actively used television as a learning media in the UK. VLEs have proven themselves to not be a disruptive innovation and are used to support existing learning methods rather than replacing them.

The post-VLE world needs to utilise student-centric Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). This means that the student has control over the tools used in his/her own learning. This will allow students to register with more than one institution, with interconnected systems allowing seamless access to data for the student and institutions. The student controls the tools, content and the relationships between these and with staff, peers and their organisation(s).

An increased number of new technologies are available to students and institutions, ranging from blogs to digital cameras, and the old assumption that students do not have the technology required is beginning to be wrong in most cases. The vast majority of students carry mobile telephones with access to the internet and often with integrated cameras. Institutions must engage with this and exploit the creativity of their students by allowing students to use the technologies they are comfortable and

A large proportion of services currently offered by institutions (often from within VLEs) are non-core services such as email and web hosting. Universities need to move away from these activities by engaging with commercial service providers restoring their focus to their unique selling points, namely knowledge and education.

The notion of PLE is based on a free market, whereby people can shop at more than one shop - students have access to the right tools for their own learning. The institution provides teaching, support and any specialist knowledge and tools the student needs, while commercial organisations provide other services such as email and web services.

A JISC funded project is looking into how various tools can be used in the arena of PLE. It is exploring desktop and portal applications from a wide number of providers to determine how a standards-based approach can join the tools available together to facilitate the move from VLE to PLE.

Four case studies were presented.

Sakai - Ian Dolphin and Robert Sherratt, University of Hull
The key point to be raised by this short overview of Sakai is that VLE does not equal eLearning. It can be a key element in facilitating eLearning, but it is not a magic answer.

Sakai is a project, community and a product.The actual product is Java based and is described as a Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) rather than simply a VLE. It was recognised that this adds a little confusion and it would probably be better if all VLE providers just called their products VLEs rather than CLEs or PLEs. skilled in using. One prime example of an institution that is doing this is Stanford University, which makes all lectures available for download via iTunes.

Sakai uses a general and extensible framework and on this basis there is the potential to use a collaborative portal system (uPortal) to tie in with other OS VLEs.

The Sakai Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation to support,sustain and promote Sakai.Anyone can join,but it costs around $10k per annum.They recently held a conference in Austin,Texas which attracted more than 600 delegates.

Sakai currently has 150,000 users worldwide but this is expected to grow to 500,000 by the middle of 2006.The actual number of institutions was not divulged, although an impressive and diverse array of universities from all over the globe were mentioned by name.
Moodle - Tim Waters, Bishop Burton College
This discussion was around engaging staff to enable them to better use the Moodle VLE,rather than giving an overview of how the product works.

At Bishop Burton College, all academic staff have attended a mandatory 90 minute training session to ensure that they are able to use Moodle.The training materials include PowerPoint presentations (with animations and speech to make them more interactive). Following this, some staff recorded video interviews to capture good and bad practice, and to find out what issues they had come across and how the usage of Moodle could be improved.This produced several Champions who were responsible for advocating good practice.

Moodle is now fully integrated with the Bishop Burton intranet, and is also used as a CMS and file repository.

The key training materials for using Moodle are found within the VLE itself.This works well for Bishop Burton, even though it seems to require some prior knowledge before it is fully accessible.

Information is contained within Moodle that is not available elsewhere within the College. For example, Bishop Burton have subscribed to various training publications from the Virtual Training Company which can be accessed via Moodle and Bodington.There is a comprehensive media gallery containing video and images produced by staff and students.
Bodington - Paul Davis, Oxford University
Development of Bodington began around 1996 at Leeds. It is now a project on Sourceforge with developers working on the system from all over the UK and elsewhere.The original design was for a CMS, and it could still very much be used as a CMS. A number of key tools have been integrated within it that helps to facilitate learning, such as student logbooks, including peer and staff access/comments/reviews. It is now described as a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) and its core system uses a metaphor of different types of buildings.

Because Bodington was developed as a CMS, its interface is very customisable and configurable with a number of additional tools that can easily be plugged in, with a skinnable interface to change the look and feel. It facilitates secure storage of information with secure passwords and permissions to ensure data security.

Bodington generates RSS feeds and can be integrated into Blogs. Dynamic data can be created and the use of WYSIWYG data input makes the layout of information easy for the student to configure. Users can use this functionality to create their own personal homepages and it is integrated into the LUCID ePortfolio system.The storage of files and materials are based around the idea of pigeon holes, which makes data retrieval very straight forward.
LAMS - Simon Walker and Dave Caygill, University of Greenwich
LAMS stands for the Learner Activity Management System. It is based on a notion of active learning rather than content management, and is used to generate a step-by-step approach to learning.

The discussion was based around a JISC regional project involving the University of Greenwich and Oxford University that investigated the use of eLearning in schools around the Greenwich area.

The project raised three key questions:
1. Can it solve problems for learners and teachers?
2. Does it support collaborative learning and enable pedagogical change?
3. Are learning activities reusable within the community? The project determined that pedagogical considerations must drive the learning design (context, level and confidence of learners).
LAMS has two elements - an admin interface and a learner interface, and (as you might expect) the admin site configures what the learner sees.The admin side has a Flash-based interface, and although the learner interface isn’t as slick it does contain some elements of Flash and several of popup windows.

The LAMS interface is relatively easy to customise, with the ability for staff to change the language and text used and additional tools can be developed and plugged in at any time. These additional tools complement the standard suite of components available as standard.The admin interface is used to join these tools together in a path that suits the learners. The joining of tools seemed to follow a very distinct path, with no sub-branches.The order of tools seemed very static and this was found in the Greenwich project to be the main downfall of LAMS.

LAMS allows staff to have a great deal of control over monitoring and evaluating student activity as staff can monitor progress during and after any activity.

For further information please ontact paul.horner@ncl.ac.uk

Roundup of eLearning projects at Leeds School of Medicine

Andy Pellow, IT Manager, School of Medicine, University of Leeds

The implementation of a new integrated undergraduate medical programme, the revitalisation of the Medical Education Unit (MEU), the development of successful distance and flexible postgraduate programmes and continued investment in teaching facilities have all helped stimulate the adoption of eLearning within the School of Medicine at Leeds University. Here are a few examples of the past, present and future of eLearning within the School.

Bodington Common

The School of Medicine has adopted the University’s virtual learning environment, Bodington Common, to deliver eLearning resources and offering the advantages of:

support available within the University
flexibility to structure resources around the curriculum
opportunities to work with other Bodington users.

In common with all other medical schools, learning and teaching takes place in a variety of health care settings and many non-university staff from general practices to the police force are using Bodington to help deliver their teaching. Following the appointment of eLearning managers at Leeds teaching hospital, we’re aiming to develop reusable learning objects (RLOs) for use in both the University and the local NHS in areas such as patient safety, emergency medicine and health informatics.

Virtual curriculum and timetable

One of the challenges of our outcomes based curriculum is that both students and staff can lose sight of the big picture by concentrating on the components that make up the course the virtual curriculum helps explain why they’re here. Timetables challenge every student’s organisational and motivational skills, the virtual timetable directs them to where they should be and helps them plan their short term learning.

eLearning in the undergraduate medical curriculum

eLearning is recognised as being effective when fully integrated into the curriculum and incorporated within the every day delivery of learning and teaching. Following the recent redesign of phase 2 of the undergraduate medical curriculum, curriculum managers have used Bodington to inform and support students and staff through the new curriculum. Online formative assessments using Questionmark Perception4 has helped students prepare for the introduction of a single integrated assessment at the end of the year.

Examples of online resources are being used to support learning and teaching elsewhere in the curriculum include:

a Life Cycle module structured around a virtual family
acquisition of clinical skills through online video
online submission of student selected component projects.

Electronic portfolios

In 2004, we joined a FTDL4 project5 led by Newcastle University with the University of Sheffield to develop and use electronic portfolios to support reflective practice and evidence outcomes. This project, finishing in October of this year, has introduced:

an electronic reflective portfolio for year two medicine students
an electronic progress file for year one medicine students.

Feedback by students and staff has been very positive. In partnership with the School of Geography, we are aiming to produce an electronic progress file working with teachers to bring together good personal development planning practice across the University.

We’ve recently started a JISC project with the Leeds Metropolitan and Bradford Universities to use electronic portfolios to support students at key points of transfer in their education. The Enhancing Learner Progression (ELP)6 project will work with students at FE colleges in West Yorkshire applying for healthcare courses, nursing students on work-based placements and medics in the foundation year one training programme at Bradford Teaching Hospitals.

Skills profiling

As well as personal development planning and reflective learning, we see ePortfolios making a significant contribution to recording and assessing skills acquisition. Our recent JISC funded Skills Profiling Web Service project7 (led by Oxford University with Liverpool University) successfully piloted the use of Liverpool University’s LUCID system as web service within Bodington to provide electronic skills logs for undergraduate medical students.

Postgraduate courses 8

Four postgraduate courses in the School of Medicine use eLearning to deliver large parts of their courses. These courses covering child forensic studies, medical imaging, clinical embryology and child health demonstrate the uses and benefits of eLearning to of learners from a range of backgrounds:

enabling learners to work at their own pace
fitting learning in and around busy work schedules
supporting learners at a distance from the campus including international students.

Assessment of Learning in practice Settings

Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS) is a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning led by Leeds University with the rationale of ensuring students graduating from courses are fully equipped to perform confidently and competently at the start of their professional careers. ALPS is planning significant investment in the use of mobile technologies (PDAs, smartphones etc.) to support work- based learning and assessment across West Yorkshire.

School of dentistry 9

Elsewhere in the Faculty, the undergraduate programme in dentistry has recently undergone a radical redesign including modernisation of learning and teaching methods and the introduction of an integral eLearning component. Dr Roger Shore, senior lecturer in the School of Dentistry, explains the drivers behind the introduction of eLearning We wanted to protect practical and clinical time within the curriculum timetable and enable students to manage their own learning to maximise their clinical and practical experience from term 1 onwards. This has been achieved by developing online lectures using Articulate Presenter benefiting learners and teachers alike and providing an on-going, rather than an ephemeral, learning resource.

For further information please contact a.j.h.pellow@leeds.ac.uk or r.c.shore@leeds.ac.uk

vle.leeds.ac.uk/
www.med.leeds.ac.uk/cdb/
vle.leeds.ac.uk/site/nbodington/medicine/
www.leeds.ac.uk/perception/
www.eportfolios.ac.uk
This is an example of an RLA (Reusable

Learning Acronym) shared with 70s progressive

rock trio Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

www.elearning.ac.uk/del/etools/spws
www.leeds.ac.uk/medhealth/study.html#taughtpg
www.leeds.ac.uk/dental/ungrad.html

Planning dissertations

David Brigden, Regional Adviser for Postgraduate Medicine and Dental Education, Mersey Deanery, and Professor of Health Services Education, University of Liverpool Mr Graham Lamont, Consultant Paediatric Surgeon, Deputy Postgraduate Dean, Mersey Deanery

As the style and content of medical education changes and evolves, more doctors at all stages of training are undertaking dissertations as part of the requirements for research modules or other degrees.This paper aims to highlight some of the steps involved in planning such a task.

When you undertake a taught module, your tutors do most of this preparation for you. They look at the material you have to learn, break it down into digestible portions, logically sequence it, give you guidance on what you need to read and think about it in your private study, organise practical activities, and finally set up tutorials and assessments as milestones, giving you feedback on your progress.

A dissertation on the other hand requires you to look at all these areas, yourself, and plan how you will incorporate them into your study time. Of course this process is itself a valuable learning experience. The key is to approach the planning in a systematic fashion and the following are aspects you should consider.

Identify what it will entail

List all the activities involved in completing your dissertation. Among other things it might involve the following:

thinking of a topic to research
finding a supervisor
drawing up a questionnaire
piloting study
undertaking interviews
transcribing material
searching the literature
background reading
textual analysis
statistical analysis
tabulating results
writing up/compiling a bibliography
proof reading
binding.

After you have listed the key activities you will need to undertake, you can then order the items chronologically, noting which can proceed simultaneously, as opposed to those that have to occur sequentially. For instance you could continue background reading while conducting interviews; however, you would have to conduct an interview before you could transcribe it. It may be worthwhile using a relatively simple project planning tool such as a Gantt chart.

Make an estimate of the time that each item is likely to take. Try to be realistic in apportioning time. You need to take account of the entire duration of the project/research. For example if it takes you two hours to read one journal article, and twelve hours to digest a book, don’t compile a bibliography that amounts to two years’ reading! Also, remember that your dissertation needs to fit in with your many other demanding commitments.

Aims, objectives and titles

One helpful way to make sure your dissertation is achievable is to have a concrete aim in mind. You can then establish what you’ll need to do to attain it. An aim is a general statement of what you hope to achieve and will form the basis for your set of detailed objectives. A very simple and direct aim would be ...to successfully complete my dissertation!

However you may prefer to have some more inspiring aim based on your fundamental research question.

The aim can also help you formulate the title of your work, which should be explicit without being too wordy! In the title, seek to indicate:

the subject area
the specific aspect/group/unit of analysis
the approach/method of analysis
any distinctive focus e.g. geographical/historical.

Objectives are specific, operational statements detailing your intended accomplishments (e.g. to undertake a literature search covering print and eSources; to compile a bibliography in either Harvard or Vancouver format). These will enable you to plan a schedule of activity with timelines which will greatly facilitate the process of achieving your overall aim. Your objectives should be as SMART as possible. That is they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time limited.

Objectives need to define a specific interim goal which is a definite and doable task. They are of little use if when you look at them you are not clear about what you have to do to achieve them. If they are clear and specific you will feel as though you are making progress.

You should be able to measure or clearly recognise in some way, your progress towards the objective compared with your start point. Again if you cannot do this then they will not help to motivate you when you are faced with a choice of working on your project or on one of your many other pressing concerns.

They also need to be achievable and to be realistic in terms of the time you have available. In an ideal world of course you would have unlimited time to read everything ever written on your topic going back to the views expressed in Egyptian hieroglyphics! In practice your reading, research and time for writing are all finite and have to be fitted within realistic timescales and the pressure of multiple other commitments.

Make sure also that your objectives are directly relevant to your project. For example, you are not likely to have the luxury of doing a lot of background reading, and you will certainly have to be very selective in evaluating articles for their immediate value to your needs.

Finally you need to identify the key time-limited milestones for the achievement of your project. This will give you a definite sense of progress and of being in control which increases your comfort level and most likely lead to your achieving the best outcome. On the other hand, leaving work to the last minute will put you under considerable stress and almost certainly reduce the quality of the final product.

Tools and space

A useful strategy is to devise a visual representation of your plans for your dissertation, such as a wall chart (a calendar, pinned up perhaps for all the family to see!), a Gantt chart, or network diagram.

Also, it is useful, at the outset, to try and anticipate what sorts of materials you are likely to gather, and think of suitable receptacles for them. For instance, boxes for photocopies, files for dissertation documents (briefing sheets, notes on meetings with supervisors), a hard back book for ideas, and so on. Label each, and use dividers, so that material can be organised appropriately (e.g. alphabetical or colour coded). This will make it much easier for you to know what you already know and to access the resources you have gathered. If you don’t do so then you may waste time researching specific topics more than once or even lose completely valuable ideas and materials.

Cautionary tales!

Nowadays most of your material will be kept on computer, but it is wise to keep hardcopy too. Also, get in the habit of making regular back ups - a floppy disk/CD/Zip drive/memory stick copy of your work - and consider keeping one copy in a different location (with a friend). It’s bad enough losing an hours work when your computer crashes (so save, regularly) - but to lose your entire work is heartbreaking.

Some additional resources

There are a very wide range of resources you can use to help you with your dissertation. For example, you can find some very useful guidance on how to find relevant information and do searches in the abstract of the AMEE Guide Best Evidence Medical Education: systematic searching for evidence in medical education which can be found at

http://www.hyms.ac.uk/ used with permission

Resource groups

Articles and reports (17)
Centres for excellence in teaching and learning
Consultation responses
For staff new to teaching (14)
For staff undertaking educational cpd (6)
For students (49)
Frequently asked questions
Funding councils, health and other educational funding sources (56)
Glossary
Good practice (0)
Health sciences & practice resources
Higher education academy resources
Historical documentation (0)
Journals and publications (42)
Learning and teaching organisations (49)
Links & repositories (15)
MEDEV annual reports (21)
Medical, dental and veterinary schools (79)
Miniprojects
Newsletter 01
Organising open educational resources (ooer) - project (2)
Plagiarism
Professional bodies (19)
Projects
Recommended links (0)
Research and development
RSS feeds
Special reports (9)
Subject review/quality assessment reports (5)
Summaries of amee guides (0)
Workshop resources (282)

Search resources

Search:

MEDEV is part of the Subject Network of the Higher Education Academy

The Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine School of Medical Sciences Education Development, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University, NE2 4HH

enquiries@medev.ac.uk
twitter.com/hea_medev
+44(0) 191 222 5888

01.10 The newsletter of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine, Spring 2006

In this issue

Welcome!

Goodbye and thanks to Andrew Short

Book token winners

Welcome to Jackie and Claire

Contents

The virtual hospital online

Developing the virtual hospital online (VHO)

The difference that makes the difference?

Where next?

Acknowledgements

Links

Authors

ACETS Symposium

Breaking Boundaries 2005

Delegate comments...

Mobile and wireless networks

Virtual radiography of the horse

National teaching fellow profile

What is your background?

Who was your most influential teacher?

What is your NTFS about?

Has the NTFS award had any unintended consequences?

What are you reading now?

What do you think are the trends in education?

What are the challenges?

Have you any advice for new teachers?

What are your 5 desert island learning and teaching resources?

Shibboleth and clinical teaching

What is Shibboleth and why do we need to know about it?

What is IAMSECT doing?

How does Shibboleth work?

How is this being applied?

Acknowledgements

Using CRANCS

CHERRI-PIE

Current practice

CHERRI C+LM Model

Conclusions

Launch of EIPEN: European Interprofessional Education Network in health and social care

GREECE

FINLAND

HUNGARY

POLAND

SWEDEN

UK

Review of virtual learning environments in UK medical, dental and veterinary education: a summary of Special Report 6

Summary

Recommendations

All developers

Developers of bespoke systems

Funders/stakeholders

Making practice based learning work

The problem

The proposed solution

Phase one

Phase two

Phase three

Conclusion

Miniproject report: Developing a virtual learning environment for orthodontics

Update

Videoconferencing

Virtual learning environment

Online assessment

The learning experience

Exceeding expectations

Workshop report: Open Source VLEs - The Next Generation

Roundup of eLearning projects at Leeds School of Medicine

Bodington Common

Virtual curriculum and timetable

eLearning in the undergraduate medical curriculum

Electronic portfolios

Skills profiling

Postgraduate courses 8

Assessment of Learning in practice Settings

School of dentistry 9

Planning dissertations

Identify what it will entail

Aims, objectives and titles