MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

The Enhancing Clinical Learning in the Workplace (ECLW) project¹ was funded as a benchmark award as part of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme in 2008,² and represents a major investment in developing the future of veterinary education in the UK. It is a collaborative venture between the Royal Veterinary College and the University of Nottingham.

Our aim is to identify best practice in the clinical workplace and to disseminate that information among educators and professional bodies in the healthcare sector. The ECLW project will provide evidence regarding the value of components of clinical workplace learning, from delivery through to assessment in a variety of contexts.

Our goal of producing graduates within a modern competency framework, fit to practise veterinary medicine in the UK,³ coupled with the variety of methods of workplace learning at the two veterinary schools involved, offers unique opportunity for ground breaking educational research and development, aimed at the critical issues in professional workplace learning.

This project is primarily set in the context of the veterinary workplace but explores concepts applicable across the education of vocational professionals.

• How does workplace learning facilitate the students’ development towards becoming a successful clinician?
• How may workplace learning best support lifelong learning?
• How does prior experience, personality and learning style influence workplace learning?

New to the team

Dr Ruolan Wang
Ruolan joined the team in January 2009, having obtained a PhD in Education from the University of Exeter. With an interest in generating an evidence-base for undergraduate and postgraduate provision and, particularly assessing the impact of technological interventions with an educational component, her main responsibilities are to conduct research fieldwork in a range of locations, using a variety of data collection techniques and to identify best practice in the use of the clinical workplace as a learning environment. Recently, she has been working on a case study of veterinary reproduction teaching, to try to determine how different teaching methods in this part of the course contribute towards the development of Day One Competencies, examining the role of case-based teaching and types of visual technologies used, using a mainly ethnographic approach comprising observations of teaching and interviews with teachers and students about their experiences.

Kirsty Magnier
Kirsty is based at the Royal Veterinary College’s LIVE (Lifelong and Independent Learning in Veterinary Education) CETL. She will be conducting documentary analyses, questionnaires, focus groups and interviews and analysing her findings in partnership with Ruolan to draw comparisons between the two veterinary schools. Kirsty has a specific interest in experiential learning environments, having worked at the Experiential Learning CETL at the University of Plymouth. She is also particularly interested in exploring the role of educational technologies such as wikis, blogs and mobile learning devices in helping to prepare students for the workplace, aswell as investigating the more traditional methods of hands-on clinical training.

Seeking collaborators

We would like to work with students and qualified professionals across a spectrum of clinical disciplines to assist with this investigation. We are inviting fellow professionals to become part of this venture.