MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

ALPS (Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings)¹ is one of the 74 HEFCE funded Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.² ALPS is a collaboration between five Universities; Leeds (Lead Partner), Bradford, Huddersfield and Leeds Metropolitan and York St John, and three commercial partners. ALPS’ aim is to increase the confidence and competence of graduating health and social care students.

Background

Due to the nature of health and social care curricula a high proportion of each undergraduate course is taught within practice settings, such as a hospital ward, community clinic or increasingly the patient’s own home.

Whilst this type of learning in practice is essential to training health professionals, often the practicalities of these placements can be difficult for students. They may feel isolated from both the University and other students, have difficulty in securing PC access to obtain information or update their portfolios and have limited feedback from their assessor due to time constraints. With these issues in mind ALPS has produced an inter-professional mobile assessment and e-portfolio system. This allows students on placement to use mobile devices to supplement feedback on their generic skills from a range of sources accessible to their tutor at the University.

What type of assessments are the students expected to complete?

The 16 health and social care professions involved in ALPS worked together to create Common Competency Maps for Communication, Team Working and Ethical Practice. These maps reflect the core skills of all health professions regardless of clinical responsibility.

From these maps a set of assessment tools were developed, intended to allow any health and social care student to evidence as many competences as possible from everyday situations they would encounter when out in practice. Written by an interprofessional group, these tools assess the skills involved in ‘gaining consent’, ‘working interprofessionally’, ‘demonstrating respect for service users and carers’, ‘providing information’ and ‘knowing when to consult or refer’. Alongside the ALPS resources, tutors have also created profession specific tools, resources and maps to maximise use of the mobile devices, assessments and ePortfolio.

In the virtual university

Using Question Builder a tutor can create assessments and then, using Compendle, send them out along with learning resources such as lecture PowerPoint slides, videos and websites, at the click of a button to a cohort of students. Both pieces of software are part of the web based ALPS system, allowing a tutor to create and set assessments on any PC or laptop. Once completed on a mobile device assessments are automatically uploaded to the student’s ePortfolio. The student can then review their work and the tutor add comments and guidance; allowing tutors to monitor student progress remotely.

When an assessment arrives in the eportfolio the competency frameworks within the suite allow the tutor to map the skills the student has demonstrated against interprofessional and profession specific performance criteria. The system can store multiple competency frameworks, allowing students to use an assessment to evidence a variety of professional requirements.

By simply checking a tick box the tutor can demonstrate that the student has achieved relevant performance criteria. The student can then track their progress in an easy to view display of multiple frameworks. The e-portfolio can be used at undergraduate and postgraduate level allowing the student to extend the portfolio into professional life and foster life long learning skills. As part of their reflective learning students also have the opportunity to record blog or diary entries within the ePortfolio.

In practice

Each ALPS assessment tool has four different assessment perspectives; self, peer, practice assessor and patient perspective. The student can chose to complete one or several of these options dependent on opportunity. The student identifies with their practice assessor a suitable assessment scenario. The student can collect audio or written feedback from peers, colleagues and patients with suitable consent.

All of the ALPS assessments are based on reflective practice models and require the student to action plan. Once the student has completed an assessment they can choose to save the assessment to their device (for example if they get interrupted and cannot finish the assessment in one go) or upload it to the ePortfolio. When an assessment is signed off as completed by the student or assessor it is no longer editable; demonstrating the potential for use of the suite to deliver summative assessments.

Measures have been taken to ensure that student data is properly transferred and protected. Intellisync software allows a seamless, automated transfer of assessment packages and learning resources to and from the mobile devices whilst SafeGuard software encrypts all data being transferred and on the device.

Currently over 200 students are piloting the assessment tools and ePortfolio, whilst an additional 700 already have the devices and are using them for learning purposes. Feedback so far indicates that the assessment tools are easy to use and helpful to learning, and some great examples of tutor led initiatives are appearing. Whilst we will be publishing research findings towards the end of the project, if anyone is interested in the systems we are using please feel free to visit our website.