MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

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.