MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

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.