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| Photo: Dror Ben-Naim |
Instead of students passively learning from a lecturer, imagine immersive online “serious” games where students can learn through practice.
Virtual patients now allow medical students at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to develop diagnostic and clinical skills through online scenarios. They can learn from their mistakes with no adverse consequences for real life patients and without the need to be at the university.
This is the kind of big leap in higher education that “adaptive e-learning” can provide.
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| Photo: The Conversation |
New generation of thinking
It’s funny to think that the same basic idea that lets online gamers score points by shooting weapons in sci-fi worlds is the same that can now help medical students learn how to save real lives online.
Many of the next generation of our graduates will have honed their skills in simulated learning environments – in much the same way that pilots train on simulators before they fly.
New technology is enabling students to learn in an interactive way, which will leave the YouTube clips and web course papers of today’s online education light years behind.
Rapidly evolving online technologies, ubiquitous connectivity and powerful mobile devices mean educators all over the world are now scrambling to understand the profound “disruption” web-based mass online learning is ushering in.
And Australian universities are no exception. At UNSW, we’re starting to use an “Adaptive e-Learning Platform” – which allows students to learn exactly the same things they did in a conventional laboratory, but more conveniently and cheaply. Teachers can now create their own lessons in interactive virtual worlds with different online scenarios.
Recently, we secured investment and spun out a start-up company – Smart Sparrow – to take our ideas from the lab and into the market, and to take our virtual learning worlds beyond UNSW. A new $1.2 million grant from Health Workforce Australia will give health educators across NSW access to Smart Sparrow’s virtual patient technology.
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Source: The Conversation
