A collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the University of Malawi

David Dewhurst and Ross Ward visited the College of Medicine and Kamuzu College of Nursing in Blantyre during October 2013. This was the first visit of the new project and important in that it provided an opportunity to meet with the various course teams delivering the new BSc degrees for Clinical Officers (Paediatrics & Child Health; Anaesthesia and Critical Care; Obstetrics & Gynaecology; Surgery and Orthopedics), the MMed course in Paediatrics & Child health and the MSc courses in Midwifery; Reproductive Health and Child Health. There were also meetings with members of the CoM IT team, with the Dean of Medicine, with a number of surgical trainees studying the online MSc in Surgical Sciences at Edinburgh and with colleagues associated with other Scottish Government funded projects – MMed Psychiatry.

Most importantly we also managed to meet with the complete cohort (approximately 40) of first year BSc Clinical Officer students who were at that time mid-way through the year 1 first semester courses in Basic Sciences. We were able to circulate a questionnaire to gather useful baseline data and to follow-up with focus group sessions with students from a number of the specialties when we were able to explore their expectations of the course, anticipated effects on their careers, difficulties they were experiencing etc in much more detail.

All of the meetings were very productive and allowed us to meet the staff and to better understand the structure of the courses, the way they are being delivered and assessed by the various specialties, and the range of resources available to the students. It was clear that while some specialties had staff and some capacity to create learning resources for their students others were not at the same stage.

Some of the useful outcomes are summarised below:

• Able to introduce them to the concept of an online learning support environment (VLE), provide them with a demo of what it might look like and what it could deliver for their students, discuss how it would be created and the timeframe for completion and how we could support them to develop useful resources. It was agreed that the new VLE for those courses delivered by CoM (created using Moodle) would be ‘branded’  as COMPASS to distinguish it from the bespoke VLE the CoM has to support their UG MBBS students. The VLEs for the KCN courses would be ‘branded’ as PG CONNECT.
• Discussed how we might find suitable resources for each specialty and make these accessible to their students. This would be a combination of identifying existing resources such as those owned by the University, using clinical networks in the UK to identify other resources which might be helpful (e.g. speaking with anaesthetists in Edinburgh; and working with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (with significant support from O&G trainees in Edinburgh);
• Exploring how we might provide training and support for resource creation including ways of incentivizing clinical staff to get involved. One example would be to structure the collection of patient cases from students (who have to submit cases as part of their coursework while ion internships) so that these might be used by a trained learning technologist to develop a virtual patient which would be subsequently quality-assured by a clinician.
• Developing a timeline for development of the live VLE platform – COMPASS – for the different courses. The expectation is that an early live version will be available by June 2014 with the full version available for the start of the next academic year (September 2014).  The implementation plan needs to ensure that COMPASS is able to utilize and link to as many of the existing systems as possible.
• Identifying areas where professional development might be focused in subsequent visits
• Working with the Project Evaluation & Monitoring Officer to ensure that relevant data is collected in a timely fashion

Workshop – April 2013

We have just returned from our last e-learning workshop as part of the e-LICE project.  We would like to thank all of those who participated for their hard work and effort during the week, and to all of those who helped to facilitate the workshop.

As this was the last e-learning workshop for the e-LICE project our aim was to bring together all of the skills that have been learnt over the past 3+ years and look to the future of e-learning within KCN and MCHS.  We utilised the KCN Curriculum Management System (CMS) to deliver much of the workshop and expose our participants to the range of tools that it has at its disposal.

The workshop ran for a week and had 35 participants, there is a full outline of the workshop in the Workshops section of the site.

The start of the workshop

Workshop – September 2012

After Olympic fever hit the UK during the summer we themed our workshop slightly with some Olympic inspired components.

We opened the workshop with the idea of handing over the baton.  With the e-LICE project coming to a close in Spring 2013 we continued to push the sustainability of our project by utilising the skills of our participants and using the materials that are readily available on the CMS to run the workshop.  During the regular week we encouraged some of our most experienced participants to lead in demonstrations and tutorials during the workshop. Participants were also encouraged to use the materials that have been uploaded to the “Faculty Training” areas of the CMS to guide their own development with the use of e-Learning materials.

The workshop proved very popular.  There was a more hands-on approach to using the CMS and it was great to see everyone in the workshop helping to teach and share their e-Learning skills with one another.

Visit our Workshop page to see more information…