JISC

Overview

Communication skills deficits amongst health care workers make a significant contribution to the rate of unintended death and illness experienced by patients within the National Health Service each year. This presents a social and economic imperative for Higher Education and NHS institutions responsible for health care training to explore more creative and effective methods of developing communication skills amongst their learners. This project will evaluate the educational impact of a communication skills learning scenario created using the Project Wonderland Virtual World platform and will determine the scalability of this approach to learning within a higher education institution.

Aims and objectives

Aim:

• To evaluate the scalability and practice impact of communication skills learning and training supported by a Project Wonderland scenario.

Objectives:

• Conduct a stakeholder analysis that will inform the design of a Project Wonderland scenario.
• Configure the virtual world to utilise a range of collaboration aware toolsets in support of written and verbal communication skills training.
• Assess scalability in terms of client, network and server CPU performance.
• Evaluate impact on learner performance within high fidelity simulation environments using an RCT research design.
• Explore factors influencing access to the resource by NHS learners and students studying at another HEI.

Project methodology

Nigel Wynne:

• Project Management WP1 and Stakeholder Analysis Lead WP2 and Dissemination WP7.
• Set up regular team and review meetings, set Project, Dissemination and Exit plans, complete project reports and using the SUNA process lead stakeholder analysis.

Emma Winterman:

• Trials and Formative Evaluation Lead WP4, Summative Evaluation Lead WP6.
• Identify/develop evaluation methods and data collection tools to analyse impact of learning on behavior using existing communication protocols e.g. SBAR.

Ian Archer :

• World Build, Application and Authentication Configuration Lead WP3, CITC and User Benchmarking Lead WP5.
• Guide world build, facilitate with CITC world IT configuration. Apply user testing protocols and benchmarking procedures.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The project will produce the following core outputs:

• JISC project website 30/11/09
• Detailed Project Pan 31/01/10
• University Project Website 31/01/10
• Stakeholder Analysis Report 31/01/10
• Technical Report 31/01/10
• Midpoint Project Report 31/04/10
• Ethics Approval Application 30/07/10
• Evaluation Matrices/Tools 31/08/10
• Final Report 31/10/10
• Completion report 31/10/10

Technology / Standards used

• Java JDK and JRE 1.6.x
• JMonkey (JME) 2.0
• Collada 1.5
• SVN 1.6
• LDAP 3.0