Project lead:
Other Key Staff:
Michael Begg (Learning Technology)
Collaborators:
Funding:
Collaborators:
Project Aims:
This project which ran from 2006-2008 promoted the collaborative development of innovative technology-based teaching and learning resources able to be delivered in a variety of modes (on CD/DVD; online (Internet); on a suitable mobile ‘phone or equivalent device; on paper).
The resources were designed by Malawi-based teachers responsible for delivery of teaching in the College of Medicine, College of Nursing and College of Health Sciences. They are suitable for different learning settings – in the classroom to support face-to-face teaching; online and via local computers in homes, community centres, Internet cafes to support learning in the absence of direct teacher input; on ‘smartphones/PDAs’ to support retrieval of knowledge and information in the field.
Collaborative development was viewed as essential in ensuring that the resources which were developed were ‘owned’ by the creators and therefore more likely to be used, and that they were culturally aligned to the Malawian healthcare context.
The project has been delivered through a series of activities:
1. Capacity Building ‘Training the Trainers’ Workshops in digital content creation
Three workshops were held in the College of Medicine, Blantyre, Malawi (April 2007; April 2008; October 2008) and these were attended by educators from all three partner Colleges. The emphasis was on transferring knowledge and skills to enable e-content creation in Malawi. Specifically the workshop concentrated on a series of Virtual Patients designed to address identified needs in the curricula of all three Colleges. The first workshop focused on the creation of storyboards, the second on methods of transferring storyboards to digital format using a Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) to build the VP navigation maps and Labyrinth a bespoke VP authoring tool developed in Edinburgh, and the third on transferring the skills required for embedding online resources such as VPs into healthcare curricula..
In total about 60 medical and healthcare educators from all three Colleges attended the workshops. Evaluation of the workshop was highly positive and there is great optimism that the workshop participants will be the ‘change agents’ in Malawi medical and healthcare education committed to further disseminating the knowledge and skills they have developed. There was also a one-day workshop for College Deans, Directors of Education and Heads of Clinical Departments to promote the project and try to ensure sustainability
The Project was supported by a specially developed Collaborative Work Environment (CWE) which enabled the workshop participants to communicate with each other and to actively contribute to the development of the online resources. The website gave personalised access to the online resources (virtual patients) as they were being developed so that individuals could work through them and suggest changes through an online discussion forum. Additional resources, such as images, photographs, laboratory data, test results could be uploaded via a wiki tool. Workshop participants also had access to the content creation tool (Labyrinth) via the CWE and to other online learning and teaching resources such as PathCAL (120 modules of online pathology teaching) and STARS (online resources to teach core competencies in stroke care).
Currently there are 40 VPs available online.
2. Development of an online IT system to record CPD activity of doctors.
The Project also built a pilot IT system to enable doctors registered with the College of Medicine, Blantyre to record CPD activity. The pilot was demonstrated at the Workshop in October 2008 and modified in response to feedback from Malawian stakeholders.
