Workshops
The e-Learning Unit at St George’s University of London offers workshops and training sessions as part of the G4 programme. The overall objectives of the workshops are to:
- Increase the awareness and encourage the uptake of Virtual Patients;
- Propose curriculum implementation and adoption strategies; and
- Deliver ‘training-the-trainer’ sessions for academic staff.
Click here for information about the Workshop Structure
These workshops introduce participants to scenario-based learning, and then in small groups, show them to how to create interactive virtual scenarios. Typically these workshops concentrate on creating virtual patients for use in medicine and healthcare, though the processes described could be applied to any competency-based discipline.
Who, What and Where?
The basic authoring sessions are intended for participants who wish to consider designing their own VPs for a variety of purposes in education, for example Problem Based Learning (PBL) tutorials, self-directed learning, assessment, patient management, and multi-professional education.
Participants will acquire the basic knowledge and skills needed for the creation of interactive branching virtual scenarios. These offer students the opportunity, at key points in the scenario, to take decisions and explore the consequences of their actions. Participants are taught techniques that will enable them to critique the process of developing viable options.
Workshops are either one- or two-day events that can be constructed in ‘mix-and-match’ patterns to fit the recipients’ needs in terms of their current knowledge, number of participants and their anticipated outcomes. Typically workshops cover some or all of the following areas in 1-2days:
- Descriptions of VPs and what they can offer teachers and students on medicine and healthcare courses
- Tuition in VP authoring and hands-on creation of VPs
- Key messages and rules in the creation of viable options and consequences in a VP
- Different uses for VPs in learning and teaching e.g. PBL, Assessment
- Training the trainers: how to pass on these development skills to other academic staff.
- Curriculum implementation options and adoption strategies
Workshops can be delivered in a variety of ways; at SGUL, at a hosting institution, or even online. So far workshops venues have included Tokyo and Niigata in Japan, Darwin and Alice Springs in Australia, and Hong Kong.