Case Story: Vet students recording and reflecting on clinical experiences using mobile image capture

Summary	Vet students recording and reflecting on clinical experiences using mobile image capture
Group / workshop	Formative e-Assessment	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Work-based learning and hospital rotations (veterinary)

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

Surface approach to learning in clinical setting - just getting the job done. Project aims to encourage both individual reflection and feedback between peers as well as feedback from tutors to students and student groups.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Three projects - myPad, CoMo and VetConnect involving varying levels of software development (CoMo mainly using existing technologies). All projects involving mobile phones or devices (eg cameras) and shared (social?) spaces.

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Varying levels of success and engagment of students. Lots of data collected. Interviews and discussions with students and staff. Our initial aim with the myPad project was provide a mobile 'clinical activity tool' that allowed student to record their experience in work-based learning using a smart phone that then allowed sharing with a tutor or other staff/students. The idea was that just recording activities in a way that was easily accessible later (via search/browse/tagging) would 'enhance the learning experience' in its own right, but that support from the tutor would be able to extend this to provide formative feedback. The model for myPad was text-entry supported by attached images/video/docs. What became clear was that text entry using mobile devices (even with qwerty keyboards) was perceived as too much hassle, even by 'digital natives' (or let's say students who sent up to 200 text messages a month using a less capable but perhaps more familiar device), so CoMo built on the idea that capturing images as the main purpose could form a less painful way into recording clinical activity. A tutor also engaged with this process and uploaded and tagged his own images (and tagged some of the students images as well I think). CoMo used a flickr account to provide a shared space and it seemed that this provided a social space as well as a 'work' space but there was perhaps a sense that everyone and no-one owned the content of this space. VetConnect attempts to build on both these by providing individual 'spaces' as well as shared spaces and the idea began to emerge, through discussions with David Hay and Simon Lygo-Baker at Kings that their concept mapping (or declarative) approach to tracking students learning trajectories could be applied to the images that students collected - the idea that these images then became 'objects to think with' that was formed during the CoMo project re-surfaced in a slightly different form - as a representation of students thinking in a more formalised way - a map of their clinical understanding of a case as demonstrated by the images they captured and the links they made between them. This combination of images and concept mapping is the subject of a JISC bid (submitted but not yet funded!) that would allow the teacher and students to monitor learning trajectories in a way that has not been possible before and allow teachers to guide students according to their visual declaration of their own understanding.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

Engaged tutor critical to success (who drives the students to use the system)

Integration with assessment rather than 'curriculum' or 'it's good for you'

Mobile adds level of complexity - keeping the project concept really simple is difficult

New buildings block mobile signals (Aaaaaaggghhh!)

Engaging the surface learner is the challenge (deep learners use all resources that they see as effective)

Quick wins important - to students and staff (experiencing the value early on - not just agreeing with the value)

Don't start with the busiest part of the course…

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.