CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript for Bringing Case Studies to Life with Leah Greene
‘My name is Leah Greene and I am Senior Lecturer in Clinical Simulation here in MMU. So, in Nursing and Health Professions we tend to work in a simulated environment. So we have simulated wards and practical rooms where our students learn experimentally through learning by doing. We also use a lot of case studies and Problem Based Learning role play.And the students develop clinical skills and then they bring those skills, knowledge, experience and theory into the simulated environment and they practice those skills in one place, in a completely safe environment, which is fully supported by facilitators.And we work with both simulated patients, human actors, and manikins to actually work as our simulated patients.
So, I have been working on two funded projects that are funded by Health Education North West. The intention of both of them is to actually bring simulation to life, to make it more realistic and to get students to 'buy in' to the simulated environment. So, one of the projects has been working with real people, simulated patients, and the other one has been working with case studies - to actually being case studies to life, which then the case studies become more realistic and they can be over laid onto a simulated patient or a manikin to again bring realism into that situation as well.
For the mentorship project, I've actually been developing digital case studies that are realistic simulated case studies simulating a student and a mentor. These cases studies are now available as a digital resource on Moodle. They involve resources and digital media that the students can watch. They are very short snippets of information - bite-size chunks - and the digital media is released sequentially over the course of the programme so that it is not overwhelming.It is not over-pacing. They are not expected to size for a long period of time and watching a long instructional videos. They are snippets, bite-size chunks of information.
Embedded within that we've also got social media, text messages, phone calls. You find out more about the person.You really get to know the person.Because my question was always ‘why to people watch soap operas over and over again?’‘What is it about them that draws them back?’And that is the same thing I want to do with our students, actually invite them back and make them want to learn and want to come back and find out more about these case studies.
They way that we have done it for the project, obviously it was a funded project, so we had a lot of money available.So we spent a lot of time working with a film crew and making really High-Tec videos, and that was a fantastic experience, but what I have learned from that is actually, the format works, it has evaluated extremely well, but it doesn’t need to be expensive. It can be done really easily using accessible technology -iPad, iPhone - because the process is the same - to inject realism into the case studies. You can have simply a Twitter profile for your members of your case study or a Facebook account and realise information that way.
I think the most important things about the case studies is that they are sequentially realised and that at the end of each video there are a series of reflective questions so they are not just taking in the information.They are actually, the students are asked to reflect on what has happened, draw conclusions and build on that and the case study develops over the course of the programme and it is works really well.’