Results

The CLEVER project will deliver training courses to educators-clinicians and educators-engineers from UMFIASI, MU and UPJS.

 

The CLEVER project will deliver training courses to educators-clinicians and educators-engineers from UMFIASI, MU and UPJS.

 

They will get two different skillsets:

 

  • (i) interactive VPC design and authoring with the use of ICT platforms for simulating clinical scenarios;
  • (ii) tutoring and facilitating CBL sessions structured with the use of interactive VPCs.

 

The trained educators will be then able to create and use their own VPCs in the everyday teaching practice.

 

Expected Results

Dissemination and Use of Projects’ Results

The CLEVER project will deliver training courses to educators-clinicians and educators-engineers from UMFIASI, MU and UPJS. They will get two different skillsets: (i) interactive VPC design and authoring with the use of ICT platforms for simulating clinical scenarios; (ii) tutoring and facilitating CBL sessions structured with the use of interactive VPCs. The trained educators will be then able to create and use their own VPCs in the everyday teaching practice.

During the project period, 24 interactive VPCs will be created and reviewed in English, translated into Romanian, Czech and Slovak languages. This gradually expanding set of virtual scenarios will cover a wide range of medical and healthcare disciplines. This large educational resource will be implemented into curricula to support self-directed learning, clinical reasoning and critical thinking skills of students at the partner universities studying in their own languages (Romanian, Czech, Slovak), but also for foreign students (English). Together with the underlying open-source ICT platforms for virtual scenarios, it will represent a complex educational solution that will be open to exploitation by teachers and students from any other universities with their own approaches to teaching and learning.

With the use of the outcomes from the four anticipated intellectual outputs [O1: methodology and guidelines], [O2: ICT platforms for CBL/VPCs], [O3: created, reviewed and translated set of 24 interactive VPCs] and [O4: feed-back & evaluation], the project will significantly contribute to a positive pedagogical change in the clinical phase of medical education at UMFIASI, MU and UPJS, and through the dissemination of the CLEVER’s outcomes also across the universities involved in RoEduNet and MEFANET.

At the end of the project, selected candidates from the trained staff at UMFIASI will become new trainers (trained by the trainers from MU and UPJS) of future educators at UMFIASI as well as from the Romanian medical faculties involved in RoEduNet, and the number of VPCs may thus be continually increasing.

A carefully designed evaluation study (resulting from O4) will show important results for future steps and decisions to be taken by faculty management, in order to continue in the VPC/CBL successful implementation.

The VPCs management system will be integrated or embeded into the e-learning platform of UMFIASI so that all three partners will have the same technological infrastructure that will permit to interchange the entire developed content, methodologies and VPCs.

All developed and finalized VPCs will be installed in the VPC management system of all three partners so that all VPCs will be available to all their students. Also, through the educational networks ROEDUNET and MEFANET, the content will be delivered to other national and European medical schools.

Given the nature of our project and its strong implication in various areas of interest, the dissemination of our results is a complex and multi-oriented task that must spread all tangible and intangible results of the CLEVER project.

Speaking about the results, we have to look at the following levels: technical, medical (both target groups, students and teachers), and organizational, as follows:

  • Technical results come from the actual building and implementation of the interactive, online platform, from authentication methods, to the handling of the online video and text material (with correlated multiple variants) all the way to evaluation tools (self and third party evaluation).
  • Medical results from the student side refer to the level of information assimilation, the level of self-involvement, the ease of using the whole learning platform, the overall learning experience in the new setup, and the usability of the online platform.
  • Medical results from the teachers’ side refer to evaluation results (both students’ self-evaluations and the results of the tests they provided), to the feedback they have for every particular case and to the process as a whole, to the changes in learning techniques and interest points as a result of direct feedback from the students.
  • Organizational results imply changes in the present curricula and in structuring the learning process for all years of study to better prepare for this kind of teaching and to better exploit the direct results obtained from the students and teachers already involved in the project.

Consequently, the dissemination will be wide encompassing and multi-level as we believe that the CLEVER project brings major changes in the way clinical teaching is performed and, more importantly, in the actual benefits for medical thinking (usage of evidence based clinical guidelines in decision making) in new generations of students. Our results should reach, because of their scoped benefits, the medical educational communities, the higher education communities, other than medical such as technical communities as well as the general public, the patients. Involving young minds in decision making processes, even if in a “controlled” environment, can prove to be highly informative and beneficial to the society as a whole as we expect that with higher quality in medical education the higher quality of healthcare services and their safety is associated.

As a direct consequence, the target of our dissemination should be, predominantly three-folded: technical professionals, students and academics (from various fields), and general public.

 

The objectives of the dissemination are:

  • Technical professionals should know, discuss, contribute, and develop the proposed technical solutions in building, running, maintaining, and expanding a platform able to sustain the specific processes of this project.
  • Students should be made aware in the beginning of the existence of this new possibility and of its capabilities. They should also be very much encouraged to use it and to interact maximally with it as the final and most prominent goal of this project but also for a real feedback on the performance of the platform and necessary alterations to the whole process. As a result, the dissemination towards the students should be continuous from the preparing the project and during its developing phase of the project and during its entire lifetime after the project ends.
  • Dissemination towards academia will be carried out in the beginning for awareness and recruiting purposes. More and more teachers at all academic levels should be involved in the creation of the teaching material. They should be informed consistently on the technical aspects and processes on one hand and on the particularities of the new teaching method on the other hand.

The dissemination of the results will use all available communication channels, professional and mass-media, both print, online media and face-to-face events.

Finally, but of equal importance, the institutional websites will serve as the backbone of dissemination. Taking full advantage of the deeply interconnected nature of the online tools, easy access from everywhere to all results and dissemination materials before mentioned will be made available and will provide direct links to all.