The End is in Sight

Hello to all my avid readers (haha). I must first apologise for the lack of posts as of late, but it turns out finishing off an e-learning resource alongside trying to pack up all my belongings to move out of a flat takes up quite a bit of time, and something had to be set aside. Unfortunately it was the blogging that I had to give up on until such a time as I could write something both meaningful and appropriate for the stage I am at. I'm just annoyed because I really found myself enjoying blogging and am worried that the slight interruption between exam results and moving out may have caused me to lose my 'flow' and has shown me what else I could be doing in my free time. And this is one of the issues, free time in the next two years apparently is going to become something of a rarity. I have felt quite fortunate that these first three years I have had a surprising amount of free time, which in my own opinion I squandered and as a result maybe haven't performed to the greatest of my abilities in exams, but I've still gotten by, however I don't know how I will manage to continue blogging on top of all my other responsibilities of 4th and 5th year. I think it will be something that I will continue to try and keep up with because it genuinely is something that I have enjoyed doing and will more than likely continue to enjoy doing.

Technically the name of this post isn't totally correct, because at this stage I should really be finished with my project but alas I still have to submit it before I can say I have successfully reached the end.

I am a bit disappointed that I haven't managed to complete my project 100% there are a few issues surrounding the patient scenarios in that the pictures used do not have a creative commons license and therefore are only there as a placeholder. Until this is rectified the resource cannot be made public which I am quite annoyed at. It was due to my lack of planning however that this has occurred, my plan was to create this scenario in clinical skills and have a realistic patient scenario set up within the tutorial, but unfortunately the final year OSCEs and nursing OSCEs were on during the last two weeks of the SSC and I was unable to get this organised.

I would quite like to get this rectified as quickly as possible, but unfortunately cannot get this managed until after I start back in July. So my learning resource will have to remain in limbo until then, not really how I wanted to end the SSC, but at least I took an invaluable lesson in planning and time management from this.

I also learned not to leave all the most dull and tedious parts until the very end. I found myself running out of steam towards the end of the SSC and not because it was the end of the year and summer was fast approaching, but more because I had already finished doing all the parts of my project that I was having the most fun doing and had purposely ignored the parts I wasn't looking forward to because, well honestly I really didn't want to do them at all. But that just made the last few days even harder because it turns out you work a lot more slowly when you are working on things you don't really want to be working on. Plus even if that weren't the case, the parts that I had left myself to do actually turned out to be the most time consuming parts anyway. This made for a very frustrating and boring final week and all that on top of the packing and moving made for a very cranky Michael to say the least.

But 4 days of solid work with all the lessons learned from our Friday presentations on design taken on board and by Friday the 29th of May I had basically finished my project after a half hour stent in the recording studio trying my hardest to clearly pronounce 'recurrent febrile non-haemolytic transfusion reactions' without sounding too as we say here in Ireland 'culchie'. Now never before had I been referred to as 'culchie', which is a term used to describe those from an agricultural background here in Ireland and a great example of how they sound is here.
 

But after eventually getting it as clear as possible I had completed my learning resource to as close to finished as I could manage without my scenario picture.

We had one final presentation to prepare for our final day and for this we had to list five main things we learned during the SSC, and here is me at my fifth birthday party with my 5 badge to show my 5 things I have learned.

Me at my 5th Birthday Party

Here you will find my presentation given on Friday with all that I have learned.

And now that I have finished moving back home, and had my second root canal treatment finished I am now ready to submit my work and finish my blog.

I must say now it has been a great experience over the past 4 weeks and +Natalie Lafferty mentioning the opportunity for us to write an article and possibly get published sounds very exciting to me as the idea of that hadn't even crossed my mind. 

I really think the skills I have learned over the past 4 weeks are ones that I will take with me throughout my entire career in medicine regardless of what field I go into, and I hope that I can continue to try and produce learning resources that may benefit other students both throughout my last 2 years at medical school and throughout my career as a doctor.

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It's been a while...

So it seems that even those who enjoy blogging can have a bit of a lag in posts. This weekend was a slightly different weekend from most as I found out I had actually passed my exams. I had had the fear for the entire week leading up to results and finding out they had been released at the beginning of Friday's session was probably one of the worst scenarios as it left almost a 2 hour window where we had agreed not to check (longest 2 hours of my life). But I'm back now realising passing the exams and OSCEs means nothing if I don't pass this SSC so back to blogging I go.

Turns out it's normally around the 18 month mark people tend to give up their blogs, or at least lose interest. There seems to be a couple of theories around this, one of which being that people start blogs with the intention of getting them out there and well recognised and possibly making money off of them, but unfortunately that's not something that happens with all blogs, and I guess 18 months must be that point where it feels like you've dedicated quite a lot of time to it and reaped no rewards. I mean I think that it's a pretty similar length of time to getting pregnant, having the baby and then the maternity leave altogether, but I mean you don't expect to have a fully functioning human being by the age of 9 months, it's something that is constant and the baby is constantly growing just like your blog if you just keep working at it.

The presentations on Friday were great, Grace's, like my own seemed to focus on the actual principles of designing an e-learning resource, whereas Adeeb, Eric and Lukman's presentations focused more on the global introduction of technology into education. All the presentations together I felt gave us all a good idea as to both the advances in technology used in education and also the limitless possibilities for education in the future.

Mayer and clark from michaelj93

In terms of my own project this weekend has been spent thinking about what to do next, how can I best improve my project and make my learning resource as useful as possible?

I took a lot from Grace's presentation in order to answer these questions. It was mentioned that reems of text aren't really the best method of getting important information and that worried me, because at points there is quite a lot of text in my learning resource. However, when I had a think about it I realised that this text was actually further information. I had to think about what my learning resource was trying to teach exactly and how it was trying to teach it, and rather than being a source of the scientific information or a source of answers it is a source that is supposed to enable you to make the correct choice in a situation. It then provides answers and explanations for those that need them and want to know why a certain answer is incorrect, but generally speaking it is more a run through of a scenario that should enable a person to act safely and efficiently in a ward scenario.

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Question Time

So today was another meeting and once again we were spoiled with cake and coffee, which always makes the morning sessions that little bit better.

I must say everybody's projects are looking great, they all seem like something that should have been created 3 years ago in time for us starting so we could get the maximum benefit from them and it is that thought that lead me to think about all the resources we've come through the last three years using.

A number of students before us have created learning resources as part of their SSC or 4th year project and I'm sure they all felt the exact same way about their projects, or projects that other people had developed alongside them. So why do we always feel they are not good enough? Is it because we expect too much from people? Is it because we feel we can do a better job? Or is it because things don't tie together well enough?

I think that some of the issues with previous learning resources is the fact that it is generally additional information that we are being provided rather than information to go alongside teaching we have already been given, or there are certain aspects in tutorials that involve new information, and this is something we don't like. We don't like sitting down to go through one of these online resources and it turn out we don't know any of the answers. These should be something that should help us consolidate knowledge we have already attained and can utilise rather than prompting us to go off and learn more by ourselves just to answer one question in an online tutorial.

I think this stems back to what everybody was saying today, that it is very hard to get consultants to review pieces of work or to provide the necessary information in a timely fashion meaning that you get a tutorial that contains information and asks questions, but they're not always entirely relevant to the teaching we have received. One example of this was back in first year when the ISS modules during GI were not in sync with our gastrointestinal teaching and meant that we were clueless when it actually came to answering them.

It is my thinking over this that has resulted in me coming back to the flat to have a good hard think about what exactly I want to achieve with the actual informative part of my learning resource, namely the blood transfusion scenario. There are a number of different methods that I can use to convey information and to determine whether or not learners can comprehend it, however I think if I focus more on having a tutorial where I talk them through individual steps they can then put those into practice, as my tutorial is not going to focus on the science behind a disease as such but rather the correct management and maintaining patient safety.

So if anybody has any thoughts on necessary facts when dealing with a acute transfusion reaction I'd be happy to hear them as it's about time I started filling my resource with all the necessary information.

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e-Learning and the Science of Instruction

So on Wednesday I chose this book to have a read through over the past week. Unfortunately it was the largest of all the books on offer and had a hardback cover...just my luck. But turned out to be quite useful as chapter 16, 'Simulations and Games in e-Learning' was very relevant to the tutorial that I have been creating.

E-Learning and the Science of Instruction - Clark, R and Mayer, R

There were 6 key principles highlighted in this chapter that are necessary to create an effective learning resource in the form of a game or simulation.

The Sims 3 : Jumanji Room by Alora246 on DeviantArt

Principle 1: Match the game types to the learning goals

There are a number of different types of games out there, strategy, puzzle, action adventure...the list goes on. So it is important to ensure your game type matches the actual information you would like to teach.

For example my game has the goal to teach students how to navigate a ward and how to prioritise which patients to see and when, so instead of using a first person shooter style game, I opted for a simulation style similar to what you might see in The Sims.

Principle 2: Make learning essential to game progress

Basically anything that allows you to proceed through the tutorial/game should actually promote learning and be informative, rather than just a question for the sake of asking a question. It should all relate back to the learning objectives that are provided at the beginning of the game.

Principle 3: Build in proven instructional strategies

Including different types of question and answer formats. More importantly explanatory feedback rather than just correct or incorrect feedback. This is something I have been attempting to do for my simulation especially since the format of our exams is a 'most appropriate answer' style question, where they may be more than one answer that could possibly be right but in this particular situation only one can be correct.

Because of this style of questions I feel like every single possible answer requires an explanation so that people can see where they went wrong or why a certain answer is better than others.

Principle 4: Build in guidance and structure

Discovery learning where by the operator has to go through the tutorial without instruction does not really promote learning.

Due to this I have tried to include small parts of information to instruct users on what to do next or what will be expected of them as the progress through various sections of the tutorial.

Principle 5: Manage complexity

This is something that could become quite important if this format of tutorial were to be adapted across all 5 years of the medical school as many different years are at different levels due to the increased knowledge gained. One possible solution to this would be to have an initial screen allowing you to select your year group and then advance through various scenarios that are more tailored to your own level. Obviously there would be nothing to stop younger years from attempting a harder scenario however some of the information may be too difficult for them to comprehend.

Principle 6: Make relevance salient

Once again this sort of ties in with matching the game types to learning roles. For example certain genres of games may make the tutorial more fun and engaging but many users may struggle to relate it to their actual jobs and therefore may find it to be a waste of time to complete.

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Workin' 9 to 5

Ok, ok, so it was over 3 days but that doesn't make for a witty title now does it? So 8 hours of work between my project and reading for the SSC this weekend. Although in the total number of free hours I had between Saturday and Monday I only worked for 8, I feel they were pretty solid working hours, no interruptions, no trips to Facebook and no stopping until I had done basically what I wanted to get done that day.

I started Saturday with one main goal: Solve my PowerPoint to Articulate problem. Turns out it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would have been.

Ok, so first I started with breakfast...

You see Articulate Storyline really hates my PowerPoint by the looks of things, however Articulate Presenter, only mildly dislikes it. Every time I went to play my presentation back through Storyline I just saw some mess of colours on the screen with randomly moving animations all over the place which I had absolutely no idea how to fix. Presenter on the other hand just messed up both the directions and the order of my animations. This was a nightmare as the animations took me the guts of about 3 or 4 hours to get the timings right, but also they are kind of key to the whole overhead game scenario that I have developed as part of this learning resource.

What to do, what to do?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was planning to use PowerPoint in Kiosk mode to get around this issue with Articulate. Now Kiosk mode is basically where you have your PowerPoint presentation running automatically and people can not advance the slides or go back unless there are specific links within the presentation that will allow this.

This seemed like it was going to work out even better than Articulate. With our University accounts we all have access to Office 365 which includes Microsoft PowerPoint Online, So if I could get Kiosk mode to work then all I would need to do is 'save as' a Presentation file rather than an actual PowerPoint file, this way it would always only ever open in the slideshow.

"Why Michael, what a brilliant idea", well this is what I was thinking, although I'm sure anybody who is totally familiar with Kiosk mode is probably sniggering behind their computer screens at the sheer ignorance of myself.

As I mentioned above, animations are a key part of my resource and the ability for them to play is also key. It turns out in Kiosk mode, even if you have set animations to begin when the slide changes, they just don't seem to do it no matter how much you shout, scream or cry at your computer (take my word for it).

Ok so actually as I was typing this post to re-cap the whole weekend's work I decided to check up on this again, just to make sure it was actually the case before I published this and made a fool of myself. Boy am I glad I did that, turns out for some reason Kiosk mode just wasn't working the first few times I attempted to use it, and now it's working perfectly fine.

So this means I've now got two possible publishing methods. The tutorial can either be launched as a PowerPoint Slideshow file, or with Articulate.

I managed to get around my trouble with Articulate Presenter by changing some of the orders of my animations. It turns out it doesn't like it when an object has a 'motion path' before an 'entrance effect'. This meant I had to accurately place my characters at the best starting position so it looked like they were coming in as the fade entrance effect was happening. This was a relatively minor fix and seems to have helped my issues.

On top of solving my actual functionality issues I have added a lot more sections to the tutorial and have now reached 50 slides in total, with many more to go.

I visited clinical skills on Friday afternoon after our session to ask about setting up the scenario to take a picture of for the resource, however the first opportunity I have isn't until next week as final year OSCEs are taking place.

I've been wondering whether or not it would be easier/get it sorted sooner if I got permission from a patient in the transfusion suite who is receiving a blood transfusion?

Other than that I have just been flicking through all the slides as a slideshow to identify any links that don't seem to work or any that link back to the wrong page. Fortunately there weren't too many and I have managed to get all that are currently there working. I'm glad I sat down and did this, because I know it's the sort of thing that I would have left until the last minute normally as a touch up job not actually realising how much needed fixed, meaning I'd probably have missed something quite important.

Something I'm glad I noticed and fixed was a possible issue with the 'Whiteboard' and 'To-Do list buttons'. Now the function of these buttons was to open either the Whiteboard or To-Do list at any point during the tutorial just for reference, in light of this the hyperlink added to the 'Back Button' was 'Back to last viewed slide'. This meant you would always be taken back to the slide you were last viewing. The problem occurred if you were in the To-Do list and entered the Whiteboard, or vice versa. In this scenario you were trapped between the two slides as the last viewed slide was one that could only take you back to the last viewed slide.

Getting around this ended up being really quite simple, but took me a while to work out as I thought it was going to require quite a bit of thought. All I had to do was remove the ability to jump straight from the To-Do list to the Whiteboard or vice versa. This meant I had to change the layout of the slides a little. Previously I had a 'Go Back Button' when you were in either of these two extra slides. Now I have an X in the corner which has the exact same hyperlink, but makes it more obvious that you are opening and closing these documents rather than just seeing them as a slide in a sequence.

New layout for To-Do list

As you can see above I have included the new layout To-Do list, with the new 'X' button and the now removed 'Whiteboard' button.

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Houston, we have a problem

It was all going so well too, had our sixth meeting today and showed our progress with our projects and I must say, they're all looking great. Like I know for a fact everybody's will be of benefit to the entire medical school and think that future students should get quite a bit from these resources.

But the problem. Well as I mentioned today, my PowerPoint animations and colours are not really moving very nicely between PowerPoint and Articulate. Now this is not very good as Articulate is the viewer that I am going to have to use to allow my project to have its learning resource functionality, so I either need to find out how to make it transfer a bit more smoothly or come up with some form of alternative.

The best thing about Articulate is it means I can stop users from skipping ahead in the presentation and can prevent the presentation from running through the slides in the order they are created in. A solution in PowerPoint would be to run the presentation in 'Kiosk Mode'. This works well until I get to the slides where I need animations to start as soon as the slide opens, but I don't want the slide to automatically progress to the next slide. For some reason in these slides the animations do not begin until something is clicked, which is something I would like to avoid.

Does anybody have any ideas as to how I could solve this, it may be hard to visualise just from my description, so I will demonstrate the issue at Tuesday's session, but for the next few days I'm definitely going to be working on it and trying to find some form of fix.

Or possibly if +Tom Kuhlmann, who writes The Rapid E-Learning Blog had any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.

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Some more furnishings

So playing around on Microsoft PowerPoint this morning I have manged to come up with a few more furnishings for the ward, the iconic teal/blue/aqua/one of those in betweeny coloured chairs and the bedside tables. So finally I'm starting to get the finishing wee touches to the aesthetic side of the resource, which is great and all but still content is lagging massively behind.

I think at the minute I feel that because actually doing the aesthetic side and the animations are part of the resource it's technically not slacking. However I still really need to focus on the actual content before I leave myself an awful lot to do in a very short space of time.

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