Transforming Professional Healthcare Narratives into Structured Game-Informed-Learning Activities - Michael Begg, et al; Innovate

Noting the dependency of healthcare education on practice-based learning, Michael Begg, Rachel Ellaway, David Dewhurst, and Hamish Macleod suggest that creating a virtual clinical setting for students to interact with virtual patients can begin to address educational demands for clinical experience. They argue that virtual patient simulations that make use of the motivational power of professional narrative can best reproduce practice settings online. In so doing, the authors showcase an online virtual simulation called Labyrinth. Designed to incorporate key principles of game-informed learning, this virtual patient simulation requires students to analyze case situations, synthesize knowledge from various learning experiences, and evaluate courses of action. For educators who author cases for Labyrinth, their own clinical experiences become transferable knowledge available to students. Though a virtual patient simulation such as Labyrinth cannot reproduce fully the clinical experience that informs practice-based learning, it can offer a way to experience and assess practice at a time when student access to real patients has become increasingly limited.

Read More..