Project Summary
“In a volatile world, ‘rigid’ equals ‘brittle,’ and institutions that cannot figure out how to work differently may not work at all” (1). This recent sentiment has captured the unplanned and unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our approach as educators. This resonates especially for those of us responsible for clinical skills teaching, as we grapple with the increasing precedence for flexibility and innovation in preparing our students for clinical practice.
The development of clinical skills is a core aspect of health professional training, delivered typically using traditional pedagogical approaches of practical demonstrations and face to face practice and assessment, with small pockets of blended learning (2). The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has required health professional educators on an international scale to rapidly transition to teaching and learning online where physical distancing requirements have removed the opportunity for in-person clinical skills teaching or assessment. Where some existing research has supported the use of small modules of online clinical skills teaching or individual resources within specific disciplines (3), there is a clear lack of research that has evaluated the preferences, needs and also the impact of online teaching and learning of clinical skills from the perspectives of health professional students and educators. Such research will inform the evidence base in this area and will contribute to the development of online clinical skill resources, pedagogies and guidelines for practice. Furthermore, the learner and educator should be key participants in the creation of innovative and sustainable approaches to digital resources and pedagogies (4). Finding new and robust ways to support the design and development of clinical skills teaching thus must be empirically designed with rich regard to the student and educator perspective.
This international and interprofessional collaborative research project will undertake a broad investigation of the perspectives, experiences, and needs of health professional students and educators in the online teaching learning of clinical skills, including online resources and pedagogies.
In doing so, this project seeks to meet the following aims:
1. Explore how health professional students and educators on an international scale have engaged with the sudden move to online learning of clinical skills.
2. Explore the needs and preferences of health professional students and educators related to online teaching and learning of clinical skills including digital resources and pedagogies.
3. Explore the support needs of educators responsible for teaching clinical skills online with respect to i) digital resource development, ii) delivery, and iii) assessment support and training.
4. Design and develop a guideline to inform development of online clinical skills resources for use across disciplines and international settings. This research project uses a collaborative international approach to address these research aims across health professional education settings.
The project will have direct impact on teaching delivery and guidelines, with the results being used in collaboration with expert learning designers and clinical skills teaching educators to develop a user-friendly, cross-discipline resource guideline for educators to use in their design, development and delivery of online clinical skills teaching across U21 partners.
Who’s involved?
The University of Queensland
Roma Forbes; Allison Mandrusiak; Anne Hill; Melanie Hoyle, Romany Martin; Freyr Patterson; Adriana Penman; Emma Beckman
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Javiera Fuentes Cimma
University of Johannesburg
Karien Henrico