Group Admins
Description
Effective online engagement is particularly relevant to health care professionals, who are bound by professional codes of ethics. The increasing use of social media for professional and public engagement requires them to develop understanding of the interactions between professional and personal spaces.
Combining conventional online learning environments and socially enabled online spaces offers the potential to provide new and potentially effective, bridges between formal and informal learning. However, how students ‘see’ these ‘spaces’ and how they use social media or professional tools for learning, is not always transparent (White, 2011). Gaining a better understanding of how students and staff interact personally and professionally with social media and professional networking sites such as, Linkedin and Facebook, may help individual lecturers, students and institutions develop the most relevant approaches and spaces to utilise in curriculum design and delivery. In turn this could support the development of effective professional and personal strategies in online networking for students.
Our institution actively engages with the use of web based technologies to enhance its teaching and learning, particularly in relation to developing relevant professional practice for health care professionals (McElhinney, 2013). We have a diverse student population made up of a mix of traditional undergraduates, mature first time students, and professional practitioners (who often have never attended university). Therefore the use of the web, digital confidence and comfort is wide ranging amongst our students.
This presentation will share the findings from a HEA project exploring digital literacies in the disciplines using the Visitors and Residents framework mapping methodology (White 2011). Our study focused on Post Registration Health Care Professionals undertaking CPD at our institution.
The presentation will highlight:
-
adaptation of the Visitor and Resident mapping processes
-
emerging patterns of student engagement in online spaces (institutional and personal)
-
how the experience will inform our future curriculum design and development
-
how we intend to cascade the work across our institution.
McElhinney, E. (2013) Users/carers, Students and …. Avatars! Involving Users/carers, Students in the Design of Clinical Simulation, Assessment and Feedback. Health and Social Care Education 2(1), 46-47. DOI: 10.11120/hsce.2013.00017
White (2011) Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagment, First Monday Volume 6, No. 5http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049 (available online, accssed February 2014)
Authors
| Name | Evelyn McElhinney  |
| Affiliation | Glasgow Caledonian University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
