Programme

Emergent technologies can impact learning and teaching in medicine, as they are suited very well to recent conceptualisations of how people learn in health care education: i.e. through inquiry based learning, problem or case based reasoning, by engaging in professional communities of practice and finally by developing literacies and skills beyond learning by rote from medical textbooks, or from transmissive large group sessions. Teaching and learning in medicine can be social and informal and in this context employing a set of emergent learning technologies can really help. The presentation will explore the potential impact of such technologies in moving towards more student-centred pedagogies in medical curricula.

In this session we will demonstrate an unique approach to curriculum delivery via dynamic personalised learning maps. The Dynamic Learning Maps (https://learning-maps.ncl.ac.uk/) or DLM system is now in use in the first four years of the MBBS curriculum at Newcastle University, and is currently being rolled out for a Pharmacy programme at the University of Bradford. The system has interest from other UK based undergraduate courses. DLM are a fusion of formal curriculum maps, personal learning records, and community-driven maps. Using established technologies and standards the maps provide 'mash-ups' of information from curriculum databases, ePortfolios and other sources. The DLM approach enhances understanding and navigation of the curriculum and provides a means for students to actively map, contextualise, reflect on, and evidence their learning. We will go on to describe some exciting planned extensions, which have recently received funding to facilitate collaboration, including support for sharing, rating and discussion of learning resources linked to specific topics in the maps. Drawing on the work of other experts, RIDLR will investigate harvesting OERs from the Learning Registry (http://www.learningregistry.org/) UK node (The JLeRN Experiment, see http://jlernexperiment.wordpress.com/), presenting them in the context of curriculum and personal learning maps, utilizing and sharing back 'paradata', whilst SupOERGlue is looking at how OERGlue (http://www.oerglue.com/), a novel easy to use content aggregation tool, can be integrated with Dynamic Learning Maps to enable teachers and learners to generate custom content from within personalised views of the curriculum, by aggregating and sequencing their own OER related to specific topics, with automatic rich contextualization, presented dynamically in situated learning events. The session will involve remote online demonstration of the system from Dr Tony McDonald, who will describe the technical approaches and technologies. Suzanne Hardy will go on to explain the planned extensions, and lead a discussion on the approaches taken.

It is often claimed that Medical Education is much benefited from technological progress. Recent advances in the social web sphere have highlighted the importance of openness, enabled social collaboration, improved participation, allowed for the emergence of social networking and intelligence and have pinpointed key new terms like “Apomediation” and “disintermediation”. All these have started playing key roles in educational processes, and have inevitably shifted focus from educators to educational resources and education material that may be shared by online communities of learning through various open educational repositories. Moreover, recent advances in the semantic web front, have shed light and emphasis on the notion of linked data, which basically concerns the publishing of structured data so that it can be interlinked more effectively and hopefully become more useful. This has shifted focus from serving web pages for human readers into sharing information in a way that can be read automatically and “understood” by machines. Inevitably this enables data from different sources to be connected in a better way and be queried more effectively and efficiently. In this paper emphasis is placed on the fusion of the above advances and how these have been approached in mEducator (www.mEducator.net) in order to organise, repurpose, re-use and share medical educational resources, by capitialising novel approaches in both semantic and social web dimensions. We will demonstrate how mash-up tools can create geographical maps of learning resources, thereby representing in a novel (but still familiar way) way connections that are inherited among learning materials and relationships built in the environment amongst the educators and the students as well. This potentially creates a new term which we coin in here, that is, “educemiolody”. In an analogous way of defining epidemiology as “the study of the distribution and patterns of health-events, health-characteristics and their causes or influences in well-defined populations”, educemiology stands for the creation and study of “epidemiological” maps, displaying how medical learning resources from one Institution or academic teacher or expert are distributed to other places and connected to other resources and people, so as to be used in other educational contexts. It is hoped and envisaged that this will become the cornerstone method of health education research, and help inform policy decisions for shaping new guidelines and standards for medical academic staff development, promotion and upgrades. Moreover, educemiology may be utilised to identify benefits for departmental portfolio implementations, that be targeting in turn towards institutional quality assurance and external audit procedures.

his talk will discuss the implications of a recent groundbreaking study showing the role of Twitter for disseminating and evaluating/filtering research findings (http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/) and elaborate on the role of social media in the wider context of knowledge translation.

Traditionally, medical education was combining didactic instruction with hands-on learning in the clinical setting. However, physicians’ specific needs are difficult to be addressed, especially in continuing medical education (CME) programs. The Institute for the Study of Urological Diseases, an organization dedicated to promote public awareness and health professionals’ CME has a long history of organizing public campaigns and different types of educational activities, such as clinical courses, master classes and consensus meetings. During the last year, we are working intensively to transfer all the educational experiences we have earned into a web-based educational and awareness educational platform. Based on mEducator, we were able to present in a friendly way all the material we have selected through the years and remained unused, as well as to use the platform in order to built up our future courses in a truly interactive way. The first application of the new development is ready to take place this month during the 5th Interactive School of Urology.

The Greek Association of Alzheimer Disease and Relative Disorders (GAADRD) is a non for profit organization that was founded in 1995, by relatives of patients suffering from Alzheimer Disease as well as by doctors of all specialties that deal with the problems caused by this disease and by other types of dementia. The Panhellenic Federation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders consists of linked Associations of Alzheimer’s Disease all over Greece, the mission & aims of each of which are concerned with the early diagnosis of dementia, the promotion of research, the education and training for all the stakeholders, the development of Care Units for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, as well as, the provision of useful information and advice on dementia problems (caring, legal or financial issues). Both GAADRD and the Federation have got an active and long lasting tradition of continuing education programmes for elderly care professionals. This includes classic seminars, as well as, teleconferences and related digital material with up-to-date information of both theoretical and care practice importance, thereby composing a real thesaurus of digital content. Recent experiences and training material from the LongLastingMemories project (www.longlastingmemories.eu) has recently been added on this content, while recent developments on semantic wiki applications fertilising applications in this domain empower the existing educational content in different ways. This is where the technologies developed throughout the mEducator project (www.mEducator.net) come into action. Much of the aforementioned material is now under transformation into becoming mEducator compliant; a dedicated mEducator instantiation will form the near future residence of this material. This will form the basis of a new EU funded project called DISCOVER, which aims to tackle 3 main issues: increased digital competences and engagement of social inclusion actors (carers);increased use of ICT solutions for delivering social support and care; and raising the profile of social inclusion work. The project will create a new service to deliver digital skills training for carers. The DISCOVER platform will aim to integrate the existing systems and provide access to rich digital skills learning experiences. In this presentation emphasis will be given on the above preparations currently undertaken by the Medical School at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the GAADRD in order to facilitate the successful application of the technologies and the content for the benefit of elderly carers.

PURPOSE: To develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a software application for creating and presenting structured case simulations to second year medical students. METHODS: Using ASP.NET and VB.NET, an application for computerized case simulation was created. This software was used for the teaching of an Immunity and Infectious Disease lab to second year JMC students and feedback was collected from the students using an online survey. RESULTS: Survey feedback from student participants was strongly suggestive that the exercise aided student learning and was a positive addition to the JMC curriculum with 86.2% of students selecting Agree or Strongly Agree in response to questions evaluating the pedagogical value of this exercise. CONCLUSIONS: Although still early in development, the application is a promising platform for enhancing the medical school curriculum by providing structured computerized encounters with virtual patients.

Medical knowledge changes at an extraordinary pace, and so does healthcare education. Students expect state-of-the-art digital tools. Regulators require increasing amounts of data on the efficacy and structure of the educational enterprise. Educators are encouraged to educate and assess learners in multidisciplinary teams. And healthcare providers are being asked to improve the quality of care using formal assessment and improvement measures. A technical infrastructure is essential to help educators achieve all that is being asked of them in a cost-effective manner. In this presentation, Ms. Smothers will review some of the standards being developed by MedBiquitous, an ANSI-accredited standards develop for healthcare education and competence assessment. She will also review projects based on MedBiquitous standards that illustrate the impact a common infrastructure can have.

Adaptation and personalization services in e-learning environments are considered the turning point of recent research efforts, as the “one-size-fits-all” approach has some important drawbacks, from the educational point of view. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems in World Wide Web became a very active research field and the need of standardization arose, as the continually augmenting research efforts lacked interoperability capabilities. This presentation concentrates and classifies recent research work and notices important points that can lead to an open, modular and generic architecture of a Learning Management System based on widely accepted standards.