Group Admins
Description
Session Description
The Integrated Interdisciplinary Innovations in Healthcare Science (i3HS) Hub is a project to promote teaching and research across disciplines for population health benefit through data sciences, which focuses on teaching / capacity building and research in the field of integrated medicine and interdisciplinary sciences for health and social care.
One of the Hub’s main aims is to work with partners to develop high quality CPD to support all healthcare professionals (c. 1 million in the UK). One strand of developing CPD for a wider impact in the healthcare profession is to create an array of microlearning materials to target the development of digital literacies among the health and social care workforce in response to the big healthcare challenges on ‘preparing the workforce to deliver the digital future’ (Topol, 2019).
Microlearning is a technique to deliver learning in short, specific bursts anywhere between 5-15 minutes, but sometimes as short as 1 minute. In the research, ‘time’ is frequently cited as one of the major barriers to engagement with training (Singh and Hardaker, 2014; Kopcha, 2012). Therefore, by using technology to create and deliver short chunks of learning, we can reduce time and location barriers for learners. In general, the smaller or more granular a resource, the greater its capacity to support flexible, lifelong learning (Buchem, 2010) for a wide range of learners.
The Hub uses User Stories to capture and understand the needs of learners. Understanding the needs of the learner helps to determine the content of the CPD and define the learning outcome of the microlearning material. We can then group the user stories and index them in order to find similarities and then use these similarities to build the microlearning materials using reusable principles. By using this methodology, we can ensure that our microlearning materials are multidisciplinary, multi-modal and truly interdisciplinary in their design. This approach also maximises learning linkages with different bodies and initiatives (e.g. Health Education England’s ‘A Health and Care Digital Framework’) as well as reuse (Littlejohn, 2003) in open access, paid-for CPD and fully credit-bearing courses delivered through the Hub.
This presentation reflects on using a microlearning approach to develop high quality CPD to support healthcare professionals. We will share with the audience the methodology used to develop our microlearning materials as well as sharing some initial feedback from users on how these microlearning materials have been used within the health and social care sector and reused elsewhere in different contexts. The audience should be able to apply this methodology of developing microlearning learning materials within their own professional contexts (not purely in medical and associated programmes).
References
Arimoto, M., Barroca, L., And Barbosa, E. F., Arimoto, M. M., & Barbosa, E. F. (n.d.). Developing Open Educational Resources through Learning Design and Agile Practices Conference or Workshop Item AM-OER: An Agile Method for the Development of Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://oro.open.ac.uk/47513/2/paperInfEdu1603-003_finalVersionORO.pdf
Buchem, I. (2010). Microlearning : a strategy for ongoing professional development Microcontent and Microlearning. ELearningpapers, (September 2010), 1–15.
Health Education England. (2018). A Health and Care Digital Capabilities Framework, 1–30. Available at: https://hee.nhs.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Digital Literacy Capability Framework 2018.pdf. Accessed 11 March 2019.
Kopcha, T. J. (2012) ‘Teachers’ perceptions of the barriers to technology integration and practices with technology under situated professional development.’ Computers & Education, 59(4) pp. 1109-1121.
Littlejohn, A. (2003). Reusing Online Resources : a Sustainable Approach to e-Learning . London: Kogan Page.
Hardaker, G., & Singh, G. (2014). Barriers and enablers to adoption and diffusion of eLearning: A systematic review of the literature – a need for an integrative approach. Education + Training, 56(2/3), 105–121.
Topol, E. (2019). Preparing the healthcare workforce to deliver the digital future The Topol Review An independent report on behalf of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, (February), 1–53. Available at: https://topol.hee.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/HEE-Topol-Review-2019.pdf. Accessed 11 March 2019.
