Designing LAMS templates for medical education

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Designing LAMS templates for medical education

• Bronwen Dalziel
• School of Medicine
• University of Western Sydney

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eLearning in Medicine

• Technology friendly
• course management
• information and content
• simulation
• specialist content websites and journals

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eLearning in Medicine
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eLearning in Medicine

• Medical education units
• course development
• course management

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Changes in medical education

• Undergraduate (5-6 year course)
• Graduate (4 year course)
• Rapidly changing
• Less years
• More content
• Disease understanding changing fast
• More pharmaceutical choices
• Problem based learning tutorials

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Years 3 to 4 - Clinical rotations

• Hospitals, specialist clinics, general practice
  clinics, community health services
• Different rotations occur simultaneously
• Clinical education by clinicians onsite
• Scientific basis of disease lectures back on
  campus
• Not always relevant to current rotation

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Medical education - postgraduate

• Adult learning
• Increasing research into diseases
• Increasing use of evidence based medicine
• Out of hours learning
• Online learning provided by specialist colleges,
  e.g. RACGP

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Medical education
Flexible content delivery
Adult learning skills
Online learning
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Background to UWS medicine

• New school of medicine
• First intake of students 2007
• 5 year undergraduate degree
• 2 years on campus
• 3 years of clinical rotations
• New curriculum opportunities for innovation

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UWS Medicine - Yrs 3 to 5

• Placed on clinical rotations
• Scientific basis of medicine course
• online
• 9 modules
• 3 modules must be completed per year
• Conference weeks twice a year

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Online modules

• Medical education learning principles
• Active learning
• Relates to real life problems
• Self-directed learning
• Reflection opportunities
• 25 hours of content 5 cases of 5 hrs each
• Log-in through vUWS (Web CT)
• Written by content experts
• Clinicians and scientific experts in relevant
  field
• Kaufman D.M. (2003) ABC of learning and
  teaching in medicine applying educational theory
  in practice. BMJ 326213-6

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Online modules

• Learning design templates
• a sequence of activities that represent a
  learning style for that module
• Content experts not elearning experts
• Examples of possible activities
• Uniformity / quality between modules
• Good pedagogical design

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Decision to use LAMS

• LAMS can present activities as a scaffolded
  learning design
• students must complete tasks before moving on to
  next task (common in PBL style)
• WebCT interface allows students to skip ahead
• WebCT unable to share learning design templates
• Sequences of activities cannot easily be
  exported, shared or re-used

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Learning design templates

• Presented at a curriculum workshop
• Made available through a word document

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Challenges

• My vision vs content expert vision
• Waiting to see some content
• Modules for use in 2009
• Hard to access content experts as they are mostly
  off campus
• Content want to include lots clinical diagnostic
  steps
• Need for more scientific content

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Early outcomes

• Positive response to LAMS
• Visual representation of learning design
• Drag and drop features of Authoring
• Preview feature of student view (iterative
  development of content)
• Most want to work within LAMS rather than in in a
  word document
• Training of personal assistants and junior staff
  (e.g. registrars)

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Reflections

• Process is iterative
• Content experts need more training than expected
  - using it more
• LAMS a space for discussion and development of
  content
• Templates should improve efficiency of content
  development for future content experts