Designing e-learning in partnership, Jane Marryat and Pat Mills
Talking heads in front of white background. There are two speakers.
LOGO:
Scottish Social Services Council
LOGO:
NHS Education for Scotland
HEADING:
Equal Partners in Care – working together to achieve better outcomes for carers and young carers
CAPTION:
Jane Marryat, Training Co-ordinator, VOCAL
JANE MARRYAT [Piece to camera]
My name is Jane Marryat and I am the Training Co-ordinator at VOCAL Carers Centre for the NHS Care Information Strategy Project. We at VOCAL were asked to create the content for the e-learning modules, for carer awareness modules for health and social care professionals. And this came about through the NHS Carer Information Strategy that stated the need for training in carer awareness for healthcare professionals. And VOCAL were funded to do that work and consequently I was identified within VOCAL to do that work and I contacted the NHS Learning and Training Development Team, and it was Pat within that team and we started working together. We had initial meetings with the Learning and Training Development Team within NHS and that was around talking about what should be included in the content. And I used their guidelines as to how to produce the e-learning material for them. So it was very much a sort of process of meeting, looking at initial content, then making plans and continuing to meet regularly just to make sure that everything was in place at the time that it was needed.
CAPTION:
Pat Mills, E-Learning Development Manager
PAT MILLS [Piece to camera]
My name is Pat Mills and I’m E-Learning Development Manager in NHS Lothian. No real challenges apart from the time constraints because Jane obviously has other work to do and I have other work to do, so it was just finding time to meet up and Jane for doing her bit and me for doing my format, and so, apart from that there was no financial constraints. Benefits, there’s a huge benefit to working in partnership for both sides to gain information from it and to learn from it, but on the wider aspect we share our scripts with other board areas for example, Glasgow and Ayrshire and Arran who take our scripts and then they work and put their local slant on them, and it encourages them to work with their local carers organisations, so the true benefits of partnership working are realised.
JANE MARRYAT [Piece to camera]
The benefits were that NHS had expertise in e-learning, producing e-learning materials and we had the expertise and the information about carers and about services for unpaid carers, and we could illustrate those by producing the voice of carers as well. So, it’s very much partnership working between the NHS, who could provide the systems and LearnPro who could provide the platform for the e-learning modules, and ourselves, VOCAL, that work directly with unpaid carers. Tips for other people producing similar things, I think really it’s about partnership working so, making sure that you have a plan and you agree times that different stages of the project are going to be completed by. Keeping everybody informed within the partnership is really important too. And looking when you’re producing this type of material, about the consents, so, for example, the carer digital stories, they give their consent to them being used in different ways.
PAT MILLS [Piece to camera]
Yeah, lots of tips really, think about your target audience, is it generic for a whole group of staff or is it a specific group of staff you’re looking at and aim your module to them, and keep your text dark on a light background. Don’t use green or red together for colour-blind, things like that. Keep your script short and sweet and simple and don’t use jargon, abbreviations, anything technical. Make it easy to read for the user, and remember that they’re sitting there at a computer on their own, so use the first tense, so use ‘you’ instead of ‘the user’, or ‘staff will be aware’. Don’t generalise, keep it focused on the person sitting in front of the computer. Keep it to short sections with questions at the end so they can reflect and check their learning after it.
JANE MARRYAT [Piece to camera]
The carers were involved throughout the process, so from the initial planning stages they were consulted about the content of the modules through to testing of the final product. Once that content had been put into a draft version, carers commented on those, and those comments were fed back into the forming of the final version. And once the final version had been put into the e-learning environment they were able to be tested online by carers.
PAT MILLS [Piece to camera]
The modules are all built in sections and each section has a few pages and at the end of the section there’s a quiz, one or two questions to check that they’ve actually understood what they’ve learned. At the end of the module there’s a page of resources where people can go to for more information. And at the very end of the module, when they’ve finished it completely, there’s a summative assessment which allows them to get some feedback on scores and make sure they’ve completed the module. Module One is aimed at all staff within Lothian and people do it as part of their twelve week induction. Module Two is aimed mostly at clinical frontline staff who are dealing with patients and carers, and that’s done as part of their CPD or their local mandatory programme. And Module Three was designed to work in conjunction with the classroom session because nurses, it’s very difficult for them to get off the wards at a certain time and a certain day, and the classroom sessions weren’t very well attended, so we developed the module so that nurses could go then and do it with e-learning when it suited them because it was more flexible, so it really is a copy of the face-to-face session.
JANE MARRYAT [Piece to camera]
Learning outcomes are very much around reflecting on their practice, forming an action plan, looking at barriers to working with unpaid carers, and how to overcome those barriers.
PAT MILLS [Piece to camera]
We currently access the resource through LearnPro NHS for staff that are actually directly employed by NHS Lothian. We will work in partnership with councils, with health and social care and we work with care homes, organisations, voluntary organisations as well. So LearnPro have developed two other systems, one called LearnPro Council which health and social care staff access. So we give them the script, the words and the pictures, and they put in their own links and policies and they rebrand it with their own logo, and on the community side people like CHAS – Children’s Hospice Association Scotland – they also take the modules, they tweak it and edit it for themselves and then they rebrand it with their logo on it. So, in true partnership sharing the module can be shared by anybody. I suppose the cost has to be decided who’s going to pay for that… usually it’s the organisation that’s asking the staff to do it, so in the case of CHAS and the council they pay their own LearnPro licence, so it is just a case of linking up with LearnPro and expressing an interest. You’ll get a quote for whatever, if you want to be able to edit the scripts there’s rapid authoring training which allows you to edit it and rebrand it. If you just want to take the module as it is, with all the NHS Lothian references you can take that as well. So there are options for people who want to access it.
JANE MARRYAT [Piece to camera]
The initial e-learning modules were developed very much intuitively using the information and guidance from unpaid carers consultation process, but now with the Equal Partners in Care core principles we can revise the modules with a greater confidence that we are being able to match what healthcare professionals require in their training needs with the content of the modules. This will enable healthcare professionals to be confident that the material that they are learning from really matches their training requirements for their role and for the level that they are working at, and will fit in with their professional frameworks.
END GRAPHIC:
LOGO:
Scottish Social Services Council
LOGO :
EQUAL PARTNERS IN CARE
Working together to achieve better outcomes for carers and young carers.
LOGO:
NHS Education for Scotland
www.knowledge.scot.nsh.uk/equalpartnersincare
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