JISC

Peninsula Medical School is a new medical school, which has adopted the principle of problem based learning as a core instructional strategy. Essential to this process is the provision of a ‘study’ or ‘learning’ landscape, which has been achieved through a commercial Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The VLE will be the primary means of communication with and between students from their first day and replaces many conventional items in the communication environment. All Core Staff at Peninsula Medical School manage their Courses through the VLE – and conversely all Courses and Modules will be delivered through the Managed Learning Environment. We are already working with learning system vendors (Blackboard) and library systems vendors (Gold Standard Multi-Media; EBSCO) towards solutions which, in meeting our particular requirements, also generate platform independent solutions for the library community.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to evaluate and assess staff training needs and methods, student needs, training and appreciation of the integrated library and digital environment. This process will only be viewed as valuable if it generates transferable capabilities for other medical schools and NHS institutions, and by extension, for other Higher Education Institutions. 

The specific objectives are to evaluate:

• staff views on VLE and library usage, the consequences of use and staff training;
•  the success and usage of automated links between resources across all sites by quantitative and qualitative analysis of student opinion.

Project Methodology

Evaluation tools employed in Higher Education are often rather primitive, sometimes not going beyond the 5 point Likert scale or non-rigorous questionnaire analysis. We believe that it is essential to take a professional approach to evaluation, and it will be necessary to employ modern qualitative methods. These will include focus group and randomised interviews, along with surveying, ethnographic and evaluative techniques. The concept is that of triangulation, to ensure reliability. A further key concept will be the inclusion of a much wider range of partners in the learning process (students: tutors: library staff: IT staff: administrators: commercial organisations: professional bodies in medicine) to give a well-rounded view of the process as a whole.  This will require the application of Multi-Level Modelling to the analyses. 

Deliverables:

• Manuals/Documents describing the integration of the working relationship of academic staff and students with a VLE/Digital Library, with supporting evaluation data.
• Manuals/Protocols detailing integration of University and NHS electronic library resources with supporting evaluation data.
• Resource analysis to demonstrate usefulness of VLE compared to print resources. Quantitative usage statistics on the VLE in comparison with textual/print resources.
• Analysis of the use of tactile/haptic approaches in comparison with virtual resources.

Once achieved, results will be disseminated to an international audience through the medium of educational publications and international conference participation.