Innovative use of Web & IT in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences
Kathryn Kolo, Project Officer - Resource Development, Centre
for Medical and Health Sciences Education, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and
Health Sciences, Monash University, Clayton VIC 3800.
Email: Kathryn.Kolol@med.monash.edu.au
Bradley Frew, WebCT and Publications Developer, Centre for Medical
and Health Sciences Education, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences,
Monash University, Clayton VIC 3800.
Email: Brad.Frew@med.monash.edu.au
The Monash University Faculty of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences prides itself on its development and implementation of innovative projects utilising IT and Web based resources. Particular support is provided to the newly restructured MBBS course which has some unique features requiring innovative ways of supporting students. In the final three years of the integrated MBBS course, the students are based at a variety of teaching hospitals instead of being on-campus. The web offers the flexibility to provide materials equitably and efficiently to these students and 'WebCT', which Monash University recently adopted as its base online content delivery system, provided the perfect framework to deliver these materials. One innovative project which used WebCT to deliver its materials was the 'Online Clinical Skills' tutorials which will be discussed further.
Two further exciting initiatives within the faculty are expanding the horizons of web use. The 'Graduate Certificate in Health Professional Education' uses an e-portfolio which gives students and staff the ultimate in flexibility with journal keeping facilities. Online submission and marking of tasks will provide exciting new opportunities in the development and archiving of medical curricula. The 'Curriculum Database Project' is an innovative, knowledge management approach to online management of the implementation of the new MBBS.
WebCT
WebCT Campus Edition (CE), adopted by Monash University in 2001 as the primary delivery tool for course related materials, provides a flexible framework for delivery of notes and other documents/materials. It also offers exciting interactive features such as quizzes, discussion boards and live chat.
For the MBBS course, it enables the delivery of materials to students based in many different locations across the state including metropolitan and rural hospitals, as well as providing interesting interactive content for students on and off-campus.
An extensively used feature is the discussion board, which have around 1500 postings a semester. This is substantial for a cohort of 240 students. These boards allow students to keep in touch through live chat with staff as well as each other, even though they may be hundreds of kilometres apart.
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Interactive quizzes assist the students in consolidating their knowledge through the provision of immediate feedback on their performance. Staff can monitor general statistics of student performance and identify areas where students are performing well or poorly. WebCT CE will soon be replaced by the latest version Vista, which will offer more features and simpler interface. |
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Online Clinical Skills
Clinical Skills are a vital component of a doctor’s training. Recognising great variability in the ways these skills are taught and performed, we needed to find a way of standardising the teaching of these skills. While the face to face method can ‘standardise the training’, we have used WebCT to provide a way to support the students learning of vital clinical skills – it is flexible and simple.
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A group of final year medical students created these support tutorials with assistance from various experts in the area of clinical teaching and practice. Essential administrative support came from key staff at the Centre for Medical & Health Sciences Education. |
| Six tutorials were created that included various plastering techniques, IV cannulation and venepuncture. Tutorials have detailed instructions with many images to support the text. These innovative materials have been received well by the students and plans are under way to create more tutorials. |
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Graduate Certificate in Health Professional Education
The Graduate Certificate in Health Professional Education was introduced at Monash University in 2003. An e-portfolio was developed to enable participants to record written reflections on their clinical teaching practices, retrieve and collate reflections for assessment submission, gain access to peers’ work, as well as provide and receive feedback.
The development of the e-portfolio was funded by an innovative IT Teaching and Learning Fund grant, and produced by a team of web-design and academic staff. This system is written in ColdFusion and hosted on a Microsoft SQL Server.
The web-based e-portfolio has participant, tutor and administrator views. Participants are provided with password-protected access to a personal journal in which course experiences and relevant reflections on clinical teaching are recorded as well as opportunities to exchange views with other participants and to give and receive written feedback on specific assignments.
For tutors, the e-portfolio provides information on and access to students’ assessment tasks as well as space for feedback provision.
For administrators, the e-portfolio allocates students to tutors, allows design of assessment tasks and maintains records of students’ and tutors’ submissions. Electronic reminders of pending assessment deadlines are generated via the system.
Since the e-portfolio was introduced in 2003, interviews and written evaluations have been used to evaluate the e-portfolio from participant and tutor perspectives. Students started the program with diverse levels of confidence, experience and competence in working with web-based resources. Some difficulties related to technical aspects were resolved through the setup of a parallel e-portfolio development site which replicated, identified and managed technical difficulties.
Further Developments have included:
• Improved base-line assessment of participant skills in the use of
IT is required.
• A statistics server linked to the e-portfolio site to enable more
objective evaluation of participant use.
Curriculum Database Project
In 2002, the Faculty of Medicine adopted an ‘Integrated’ style of Curriculum for the new first year intake. This replaced the traditional subject-by-subject style of teaching with a ‘Theme’ based approach, with the intention of allowing students to focus upon a collection of ‘Learning Objectives’ in a more relevant order.
Since commencement, the need has been identified for a dynamic record keeping and reporting system of the Curriculum, and for students and staff to have readily available online access to their relevant course information.
The Curriculum Database application - dubbed Medways - serves the purpose of meeting these needs.
The following diagram shows the 6-level Learning Objectives hierarchy and how objectives from the various levels link up to one another.
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The idea behind this is that objectives higher up in the hierarchy define a broad set of learning goals, whereas those in the lower levels define very specific goals. In brief, Global Objectives are the goals that students are to meet throughout their entire 5 year course. Global Theme Objectives are a more specific breakdown of the Global Objectives, and from here are collected into groups of 4 major Themes of study. The idea behind this is that objectives higher up in the hierarchy define a broad set of learning goals, whereas those in the lower levels define very specific goals. Global Objectives are the goals that students are to meet throughout their entire 5 year course. Global Theme Objectives are a more specific breakdown of the Global Objectives, and from here are collected into groups of 4 major Themes of study. Semester Theme Objectives are a breakdown of the Global Theme Objectives, but are now specific to the semester a student is studying within. Collateral Themes are introduced at this level (such as the Rural Health component), sitting alongside the defined 4 major Themes. Weekly Theme Objectives are a breakdown of the Semester Theme Objectives, with a new collection of Objectives set for each week of study. Integrated Weekly Objectives are defined as a summary of the Weekly Theme Objectives for each week of study. Finally, the most specific set of objectives are defined for the Sessions that students attend. The arrows indicate the upward links that can be derived through related objectives, being able to follow through from the Session level and seeing how it relates to an overall global objective. |
The Semester area of management below, shows the interface layout reflecting the rest of the Learning objective hierarchy.
The section enables historical tracking of changes in study guide documents – one of the key areas this project addresses. Study Guide documents contain the learning objectives that students are given in the sessions they attend.