Patient Stories
Rebecca Ferriday Rebecca Ferriday started her career in adult education as a literacy tutor before becoming a teacher educator in FE (running and delivering the PGCE and Cert Ed), but her growing love of technology has led her to become a Learning Technology Manager in HE. Despite moving from away teaching literacy, she still looks for links between this and her current role and keeps a keen eye on how the delivery of and interpretation of literacy (and now adult and digital literacies) is managed.
When studying to become a healthcare professional, learning medical theory and hard facts can become all- consuming, often to the detriment of equally important concepts and skills such as empathy and understanding of patient need.
In order to bring about a greater balance between learning medical terminology and learning to understand how a patient feels, filming interviews with individuals who have been affected by illness have been standard practice at Cardiff University's School of Healthcare Sciences for several years. These films are made available to students to watch in their own time (via the university's in-house 'YouTube-alike' media player), or on the university's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), and students are encouraged by lecturing staff to watch them. Historically (and typically), this hasn't happened. Student uptake has been virtually non-existent, and the films languish in digital purgatory, never to be viewed by those for whom they were intended.
I have always believed that people learn when they are actually doing something: when they are active contributors rather than passive viewers. I wanted to pursue this belief, and use the patient story films as a basis for an idea I had about producing bite-sized pieces of online learning. I met with the lecturer who had made the original films, and we decided to look at how to re-purpose these films so that they might make more of an impact.
Each of the films was 30 minutes or more in length. With the best will in the world, watching a static camera filming somebody sitting in an armchair and talking for more than a few minutes can be a dull and passive experience. Not only that, but the few students who had watched these films had no way of gauging whether learning and understanding had taken root. There was nothing to assess, per se.
And so it was agreed that we needed to make the films more engaging, and that to do this they needed to be broken into shorter chunks. To gauge learning and understanding, students could be asked questions after each clip. These questions could be open in order to gauge individual opinion, or closed, completed as multiple choice or true/false style questions to assess understanding.
The following strategy was employed:
1. Students watch a brief film clip 2. They are then presented with a couple of online questions 3. Once the questions have been answered, the activity moves to the next film clip 4. Stages 2 and 3 are repeated until the film is shown in its entirety 5. Links to useful journal articles papers, websites are provided, either interspersed throughout the activity or at the end.
Once authored, activities are uploaded to the university's VLE and the option to track student access is switched on. This means that lecturers can grab user statistics and see how many times the activities have been accessed, and look at the responses given to questions.
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