2011 Celebrate Learning Week Program

EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION & RESEARCH: Exploring virtual learning environments and excellence in education research THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2011 MICHAEL SMITH LABS BUILDING, 2185 EAST MALL 9:30AM - 1:30PM Speakers: 9:30 am Dr. Stephen Chapman, Keele University, UK 10:45 am Dr. Kevin Eva, University of British Columbia 12:00 pm Lunch Reception & Poster Session

VIRTUAL PATIENTS AND TOTAL IMMERSION ENVIRONMENTS: ENHANCING CLINICAL LEARNING & CONTEXTUALISING SCIENCE Dr. Stephen Chapman Head, School of Pharmacy and Professor, Prescribing Studies Keele University, UK Dr. Chapman will share his views on one of the major challenges facing all pharmacy courses, indeed all health care professions – and that is: embedding increased clinical content within the syllabus and keeping the basic science, underpinning medicines, contextualized within that content. Clinical teaching of students has two basic prerequisites – access to appropriate patients and standardisation of the experience. Finding the right patients at the right time for clinical teaching is always a challenge, whether on a hospital ward or in general practice. Standardization is even trickier – patients soon get tired of explaining their signs and symptoms, impacting student learning experiences. Keele‘s ‘Virtual Patient‘ eLearning system offers the learner a virtual environment where verbal or text commands from the learner to the ‘patient’ result in an immediate verbal or non-verbal response from an animated computer graphic (avatar). Signs and symptoms can be accurately represented, clinical dialogue and case history taking is naturalistic and the avatar provides immediate structured feedback to the student. This seminar will explore how a virtual patient case is developed, its decision tree and use of technology for its delivery (asynchronously or online), with examples of both undergraduate cases and postgraduate packages (for continued professional development of qualified health care professionals).

Live 3D Demo: KAVE You are also invited to experience a live demonstration of Keele‘s 3D Keele Active Virtual Environment (“KAVE”), as part of Celebrate Learning Week, Nov 2-4, 2011, Room 160 Cunningham Building. Please contact Sharon Brown (shbrown@mail.ubc.ca) to book a spot.

EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION RESEARCH: DEFINING THE PARAMETERS Dr. Kevin Eva Senior Scientist, CHES and Associate Professor, Director, Educational Research & Scholarship, Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia Dr. Eva will share his views on how health professional education as a field is rife with diversity (of scholarly backgrounds, methodological approaches, and conceptual outlooks). That diversity is an essential condition for the field‘s current success and continued maturation, but it simultaneously creates challenges with respect to defining quality in a uniform and productive manner. This talk will be aimed at prompting reflection on how we might move conceptualizations of quality in education research forward by changing the terms of the debate. Methodological rigour is important, but we must also recognize that scientific progress has little to do with method. In complex domains like education research we are better served by focusing on a broader definition of excellence, striving for progress through the accumulation of empirical information that helps us think better about the practical goals with which we struggle.

What this means in terms of judging the quality of research being performed in health professional education is that any objective checklist will be insufficient.

Determining the value (and publishability) of any given study requires judgment guided by reference to the empirical findings and theories that came before it. Determining whether or not progress is being made in an area of study requires judging whether or not empirically unsupported ideas are being discarded, whether or not the conversations stimulated by the research efforts have changed, and whether or not the focus of our research efforts continue to evolve.

Dr. Stephen Chapman Dr. Stephen Chapman is Professor of Prescribing Studies and Head of the School of Pharmacy at Keele University, England. As well as providing the academic lead on issues such as implementing evidence based medicine, pre-scribing databases and health service prescribing policies, he heads a unit which provides prescribing advice to the West Midlands Strategic Health Authorities and PCTs. His current projects include decision analysis support, out-come guarantees for medicines, and virtual patients for training of healthcare professionals. Dr. Chapman’s career spans the pharmaceutical industry, the Health Service and academia. He has published widely in peer group reviewed journals and edited over 100 bespoke prescribing reports. He is co-editor of the book “Medicines Management” published by the BMJ Press, and has contributed chapters to books on ‘Nurse Prescribing’, ‘Influencing demand by professional education and information’ and ‘Pharmacoeconomics’.

He is a member of the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority’s Appeal Board, and the Education Expert Advisory Panel of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Dr. Kevin Eva Dr. Kevin Eva is Senior Scientist at the Centre for Health Education Scholarship (CHES) and Associate Professor, Director of Educational Research and Scholarship in the Dept. of Medicine at UBC since July 2010. He completed his PhD in Cognitive Psychology (McMaster University) in 2001 and became Editorin-Chief for the journal Medical Education in 2008. In addition to sitting on four other editorial boards, Dr. Eva maintains appointments as Associate Professor in the Dept. of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University (Canada) and in the School of Health Education at Maastricht University (The Netherlands), and as Visiting Professor at Bern University (Switzerland). His current research interests are broadly defined within the context of research into educational practices within the health professions, which include the (1) value and limits of subjective judgment, (2) promotion and assessment of non-cognitive characteristics in professional practice, (3) context specific nature of performance, (4) conceptualization, nature, and use of self-assessment, (5) psychological processes that impact upon one’s responsiveness to feedback, and (6) nature of clinical expertise. Recent awards for this work include an Innovator of Distinction Award from McMaster University, the Canadian Association for Medical Education’s Junior Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Education, and the Association of Faculties of Medicine in Canada-GlaxoSmithKline Young Educators Award.