Programme

Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 07:00 to 08:30
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 08:30 to 09:00
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 09:00 to 09:30
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Epistemological and didactical foundation for Technology Enhanced Learning

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The challenge of designing and implementing computer-based learning environments is to incorporate into them teaching features: the capacity to recognize and capture relevant events from observing the learner activity, the ability to understand the learning needs and then to provide the adequate feedback in the most adapted form. This challenge is even more demanding when the knowledge at stake cannot be fully accessible with explicit representations but has to be materialised by means of simulations and shared within an apprenticeship approach. What means "relevant event", "learning needs" and "adequate feedback" are epistemological questions which cannot be answered only in technical terms. This talk will present concepts from the theory of didactical situations and a modelling approach knowledge centered which can ground the search for responses. Concrete examples from mathematics and surgery will be used to provide an intuition of the generic value of the proposed framework.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 09:30 to 11:00
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Can emergent learning technologies support the transformation of medical ‘training’ into medical education?

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Emergent technologies can impact learning and teaching in medicine, as they are suited very well to recent conceptualisations of how people learn in health care education: i.e. through inquiry based learning, problem or case based reasoning, by engaging in professional communities of practice and finally by developing literacies and skills beyond learning by rote from medical textbooks, or from transmissive large group sessions. Teaching and learning in medicine can be social and informal and in this context employing a set of emergent learning technologies can really help. The presentation will explore the potential impact of such technologies in moving towards more student-centred pedagogies in medical curricula.
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Emerging Learning in Multi-lingual Environments

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In a complex and dynamic environment learning and knowledge are cornerstones of a person’s development. Individuals follow a reflective and dialectic cycle of interactions with knowledge resources and community members towards enriching knowledge and thus achieving learning. Moreover, knowledge resources and community members should be limited by a language barrier. Building upon these arguments, this talk argues for an organic, bottom-up approach embracing the inherent social aspects of learning and knowledge creation. MORMED is described as an environment nurturing the formation of emergent learning whilst transcending the language barrier, and is applied in the area of Lupus disease. In this talk I will explain how MORMED is creating the infrastructure that facilitates the emergent learning between members of Lupus disease community.
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Dynamic Learning Maps, an overview and demonstration of an unique curriculum delivery system

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In this session we will demonstrate an unique approach to curriculum delivery via dynamic personalised learning maps. The Dynamic Learning Maps (https://learning-maps.ncl.ac.uk/) or DLM system is now in use in the first four years of the MBBS curriculum at Newcastle University, and is currently being rolled out for a Pharmacy programme at the University of Bradford. The system has interest from other UK based undergraduate courses. DLM are a fusion of formal curriculum maps, personal learning records, and community-driven maps. Using established technologies and standards the maps provide 'mash-ups' of information from curriculum databases, ePortfolios and other sources. The DLM approach enhances understanding and navigation of the curriculum and provides a means for students to actively map, contextualise, reflect on, and evidence their learning. We will go on to describe some exciting planned extensions, which have recently received funding to facilitate collaboration, including support for sharing, rating and discussion of learning resources linked to specific topics in the maps. Drawing on the work of other experts, RIDLR will investigate harvesting OERs from the Learning Registry (http://www.learningregistry.org/) UK node (The JLeRN Experiment, see http://jlernexperiment.wordpress.com/), presenting them in the context of curriculum and personal learning maps, utilizing and sharing back 'paradata', whilst SupOERGlue is looking at how OERGlue (http://www.oerglue.com/), a novel easy to use content aggregation tool, can be integrated with Dynamic Learning Maps to enable teachers and learners to generate custom content from within personalised views of the curriculum, by aggregating and sequencing their own OER related to specific topics, with automatic rich contextualization, presented dynamically in situated learning events. The session will involve remote online demonstration of the system from Dr Tony McDonald, who will describe the technical approaches and technologies. Suzanne Hardy will go on to explain the planned extensions, and lead a discussion on the approaches taken.
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Facilitating the design and enactment of Moodle based medical training activities using the CADMOS tool

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CADMOS is a graphical design tool that has been created in order to be used by novice learning designers, i.e. practitioners/teachers with basic computer skills and knowledge of learning standards, for specifying and orchestrating the activities of a learning script. Its innovative feature is that it enables a learning designer to enact a learning script in the Moodle learning platform . This paper will show an example from medical education sector how CADMOS can aid in bridging the gap between the design and the enactment of a learning script without the need of any technical knowledge about the Moodle platform.
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Educemiology: the “Epidemiology” of Medical Learning Resources

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It is often claimed that Medical Education is much benefited from technological progress. Recent advances in the social web sphere have highlighted the importance of openness, enabled social collaboration, improved participation, allowed for the emergence of social networking and intelligence and have pinpointed key new terms like “Apomediation” and “disintermediation”. All these have started playing key roles in educational processes, and have inevitably shifted focus from educators to educational resources and education material that may be shared by online communities of learning through various open educational repositories. Moreover, recent advances in the semantic web front, have shed light and emphasis on the notion of linked data, which basically concerns the publishing of structured data so that it can be interlinked more effectively and hopefully become more useful. This has shifted focus from serving web pages for human readers into sharing information in a way that can be read automatically and “understood” by machines. Inevitably this enables data from different sources to be connected in a better way and be queried more effectively and efficiently. In this paper emphasis is placed on the fusion of the above advances and how these have been approached in mEducator (www.mEducator.net) in order to organise, repurpose, re-use and share medical educational resources, by capitialising novel approaches in both semantic and social web dimensions. We will demonstrate how mash-up tools can create geographical maps of learning resources, thereby representing in a novel (but still familiar way) way connections that are inherited among learning materials and relationships built in the environment amongst the educators and the students as well. This potentially creates a new term which we coin in here, that is, “educemiolody”. In an analogous way of defining epidemiology as “the study of the distribution and patterns of health-events, health-characteristics and their causes or influences in well-defined populations”, educemiology stands for the creation and study of “epidemiological” maps, displaying how medical learning resources from one Institution or academic teacher or expert are distributed to other places and connected to other resources and people, so as to be used in other educational contexts. It is hoped and envisaged that this will become the cornerstone method of health education research, and help inform policy decisions for shaping new guidelines and standards for medical academic staff development, promotion and upgrades. Moreover, educemiology may be utilised to identify benefits for departmental portfolio implementations, that be targeting in turn towards institutional quality assurance and external audit procedures.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 11:00 to 11:20
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 11:20 to 11:50
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The use of social media to disseminate and filter new research findings

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his talk will discuss the implications of a recent groundbreaking study showing the role of Twitter for disseminating and evaluating/filtering research findings (http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/) and elaborate on the role of social media in the wider context of knowledge translation.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 11:50 to 13:10
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Web2.0 and Social Media in Medical Education

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Social media applications will have a transformative effect on the nature of medicine and healthcare in the future, if the rhetoric around their use is to be believed. There is some evidence that the nature of healthcare interactions between doctors and their patients, and other healthcare professionals, is changing. However, it is also suggested by some that medical education is lagging behind in use of social media. This presentation will introduce examples of commonly used social media applications and of the ways in which they are being used to change healthcare and medical education. It is also important that research be undertaken to provide evidence of the real impact of such applications. The presentation will conclude by introducing some questions that might form the basis of the development of a research agenda in this area. The presentation will draw on work being undertaken by members of the IMIA Social Media Working Group in these areas.
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Integrating Education, Research and Human Caring via Web 2.0 for Healthcare Professionals

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Health care professional educators are becoming more aware of the benefits associated with the application of social media tools, such as the popular online platforms, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikieducator and Skype for today’s healthcare providers and students. There has been an increase in the number of publications regarding the use of social media tools in professional education, however there is a lack of evidence of the overall benefits provided by these online social platforms and guidelines on how to use the media to improve student learning outcomes. Furthermore, due to the generational gap between senior faculty and today’s millennial learner there may be hesitancy for some healthcare faculty to endeavor the use of social media (Roberts, Newman & Schwartzstein, 2012). Therefore, a current review of the literature and presentation of the integration of the use of social media in professional education will be presented to the audience.
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Online videos for health education

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Online social videos are extremely popular in the context of health social media. For example, YouTube is the third most visit webpage worldwide where millions of user are sharing videos with their peers. Health organizations are also sharing videos on YouTube. According to Ed Benett study (ebennett.org) nearly 600 US Hospitals have published over 60.000 videos online. Many of those videos have a great potential for medical education. This presentation will provide an overview of the current evidence on the use of social videos for medical education including the advantages and challenges. In addition, we will cover latest trends such as 3D and interactive videos.
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An information behaviour framework for informed and involved patients for clinical decisions: the role of Web 2.0 in shared decision-making

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The prevalent in most healthcare settings clinical decision-making pattern is the one with the doctors being the exclusive decision-makers and the patients having an inactive role, excepting the decisions taken for them, because they differ to the physician’s information and knowledge. This fact is well grounded within our socioeconomic ethos and is supported, among others, by a studied information behaviour paradigm. The concept of the Web 2.0 is bringing about changes and drives innovation towards a new patient-doctor relationship for a more shared clinical decision-making pattern. Quite interestingly, recent research indicates that informed patients have better outcomes than patients who are passive recipients of care; while significant cost savings are achieved by reducing unnecessary medical interventions. Shared-decision goes beyond ethical and regulatory matters towards a cooperative process in which physicians and patients act together for improving the quality of diagnosis and treatment, based on patient’s informed preferences. This involves new roles from both parties, a novel “information counselling” model with the corresponding information behaviour change, based on the development of Web 2.0 healthcare services confidence. This paper initially provides an analysis of behaviour changes towards shared-decision making schemes due to the influences of the internet on clinician–patient relationship, through the provision of evidence-based information about options, outcomes and clinical uncertainties. Thereafter, the Wilson’s information behaviour model is employed, explained and expanded in order both parties to share information and decision-making responsibilities. The internet and Web 2.0 in particular through the development of new ways of interactivity have created a shift to a “shared information behaviour”; however, respect and confidence builds within “real world”, and changes usually takes place over time.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 13:10 to 14:00
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 14:00 to 14:30
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Toward a Medical Simulation Metaverse

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What happens when virtual patients meet advanced simulations and real clinical data sources? Dr Zary will present initiatives that are driving virtual patients toward an increased diversity in how they are created, designed and implemented. How will virtual patients enable personalized life-long learning and assessment? How do you share dynamically generated virtual patients? Is the era of single encounter virtual patients over? These are some of the issues Dr. Zary will adress in his keynote presentation.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 14:30 to 16:15
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The need for training and updating knowledge in tele-orthopaedics: opportunities for mEducator technologies uptake

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This presentation will deal with two studies that demonstrate the use of telemedicine in orthopaedics. The work was developed in collaboration with the Pafos General Hospital, the Nicosia General hospital and the University of Cyprus. The first study deals with everyday practice scenarios where the expert is asked to provide expert knowledge from a remote location to a trainee in orthopaedics or other medical practitioner who happen to be with the patient. Medical data such as x-rays, videos, MRI, and photos from the incident are easily transmitted via a telemedicine device to the location of the expert providing an accurate information for the expert in order to be able to form an expert opinion an thus advice accordingly. The second study will show how trainees in orthopaedic can be benefited by watching remotely and asking questions while an expert performs a specialised operation. This facility can work both ways thus giving the opportunity to any surgeon to consult during the operation an expert should the need for such help arises. Both studies can be recorded and retrieved at a later stage for educational purposes and retraining courses. The mEducator platform has provided a very practical tool for utilizing use case scenarios.
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mEducator application: Transforming an educational and awareness institute on line

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Traditionally, medical education was combining didactic instruction with hands-on learning in the clinical setting. However, physicians’ specific needs are difficult to be addressed, especially in continuing medical education (CME) programs. The Institute for the Study of Urological Diseases, an organization dedicated to promote public awareness and health professionals’ CME has a long history of organizing public campaigns and different types of educational activities, such as clinical courses, master classes and consensus meetings. During the last year, we are working intensively to transfer all the educational experiences we have earned into a web-based educational and awareness educational platform. Based on mEducator, we were able to present in a friendly way all the material we have selected through the years and remained unused, as well as to use the platform in order to built up our future courses in a truly interactive way. The first application of the new development is ready to take place this month during the 5th Interactive School of Urology.
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Preventing Heart Diseases in the children ages: prospects of using mEducator technologies in the CHILDRENHEALTH regional project

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Several assumptions regarding the onset of cardiovascular diseases have been made during the a Greece-Bulgaria cross-border collaboration project which run from 2006 to 2008, by assessing and eventually mitigating the problems from the increasing of obesity and cardiovascular diseases in the general population starting from the infancy. A recently initiated regional collaboration project aims to foster cross-border scientific collaboration between Greece and FYROM. All the data that will be recorded within this project (known and new clinical risk factors for obesity and cardiovascular diseases, statistical elaboration of clinical and genetic data in order to create individual risk profiles for the under study children and personalization of the intervention) will lead to (i) Informing the general population about the problems related to obesity and the health problems correlated to the accumulation of adipose tissue in a more targeted way, (ii) Informing and educating teachers and rural doctors, but also families about the possibilities of prevention and health education. The clinical study will be complemented by the use of state-of-the-art technologies and Best Practices arising from mEducator project. Web3.0 tools such as the semantic wiki for semantic tagging of findings which will allow the cross-institutional analysis of health-related issues will be initiated. To this extend the use of Web2.0 tools for effective communication between health professionals and cross-border populations as well as for collaborative learning will be exploited by the use of mEducator resources.
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Training Professionals in Elderly Health Care: prospects of using mEducator technologies in activities of the Greek Federattion of Alzheimers Associations and the DISCOVER project

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The Greek Association of Alzheimer Disease and Relative Disorders (GAADRD) is a non for profit organization that was founded in 1995, by relatives of patients suffering from Alzheimer Disease as well as by doctors of all specialties that deal with the problems caused by this disease and by other types of dementia. The Panhellenic Federation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders consists of linked Associations of Alzheimer’s Disease all over Greece, the mission & aims of each of which are concerned with the early diagnosis of dementia, the promotion of research, the education and training for all the stakeholders, the development of Care Units for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, as well as, the provision of useful information and advice on dementia problems (caring, legal or financial issues). Both GAADRD and the Federation have got an active and long lasting tradition of continuing education programmes for elderly care professionals. This includes classic seminars, as well as, teleconferences and related digital material with up-to-date information of both theoretical and care practice importance, thereby composing a real thesaurus of digital content. Recent experiences and training material from the LongLastingMemories project (www.longlastingmemories.eu) has recently been added on this content, while recent developments on semantic wiki applications fertilising applications in this domain empower the existing educational content in different ways. This is where the technologies developed throughout the mEducator project (www.mEducator.net) come into action. Much of the aforementioned material is now under transformation into becoming mEducator compliant; a dedicated mEducator instantiation will form the near future residence of this material. This will form the basis of a new EU funded project called DISCOVER, which aims to tackle 3 main issues: increased digital competences and engagement of social inclusion actors (carers);increased use of ICT solutions for delivering social support and care; and raising the profile of social inclusion work. The project will create a new service to deliver digital skills training for carers. The DISCOVER platform will aim to integrate the existing systems and provide access to rich digital skills learning experiences. In this presentation emphasis will be given on the above preparations currently undertaken by the Medical School at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the GAADRD in order to facilitate the successful application of the technologies and the content for the benefit of elderly carers.
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Using Self-Assessment Virtual Patients on Mobile Devices

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Background: Since 2009, the undergraduate course at St George’s, University of London (SGUL) has used online Virtual Patients (VPs) to deliver its Problem-Based Learning (PBL) curriculum. VPs allow learners to explore the consequences of the decisions that they make, providing a rich and engaging learning experience ideally suited for the teaching of clinical reasoning. In addition to the PBL sessions, SGUL provides students with a structured programme (1-3 per week) of additional VPs designed for formative self-assessment, which correspond to and complement the learning provided by the PBL curriculum. However, when provided through a web interface, student take-up of these resources was considerably lower than anticipated. Objective: To address low student usage of self-assessment resources by offering VPs on a delivery platform that better suited their working habits for self-directed learning. Method: Based on the results of a student survey, conducted annually, that polls student use of mobile devices, an app that allows virtual patients to be played on mobile devices was developed. The app included assessment functionality such as single best answer and enquiry-based questions, and cumulative scoring, and allowed VPs to be downloaded to the device and played without the need to maintain a network connection. The design of the app was informed by both usability studies and student feedback. Results: The app was first released to students in September 2011, and the same assessment VPs are made available on the app as on the web. Feedback from students indicates that the app has been warmly received, and that the self-assessment resources are now being used more widely, with a higher student-uptake. Conclusions: Student motivation to make use of self-directed learning resources was increased by using a delivery platform which suited their learning needs and working habits.
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Justification of Medical Cognition: A Virtual Patient Project

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PURPOSE: To develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a software application for creating and presenting structured case simulations to second year medical students. METHODS: Using ASP.NET and VB.NET, an application for computerized case simulation was created. This software was used for the teaching of an Immunity and Infectious Disease lab to second year JMC students and feedback was collected from the students using an online survey. RESULTS: Survey feedback from student participants was strongly suggestive that the exercise aided student learning and was a positive addition to the JMC curriculum with 86.2% of students selecting Agree or Strongly Agree in response to questions evaluating the pedagogical value of this exercise. CONCLUSIONS: Although still early in development, the application is a promising platform for enhancing the medical school curriculum by providing structured computerized encounters with virtual patients.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 16:15 to 16:30
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 16:30 to 17:30
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Towards a Standards Infrastructure in Healthcare Education

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Medical knowledge changes at an extraordinary pace, and so does healthcare education. Students expect state-of-the-art digital tools. Regulators require increasing amounts of data on the efficacy and structure of the educational enterprise. Educators are encouraged to educate and assess learners in multidisciplinary teams. And healthcare providers are being asked to improve the quality of care using formal assessment and improvement measures. A technical infrastructure is essential to help educators achieve all that is being asked of them in a cost-effective manner. In this presentation, Ms. Smothers will review some of the standards being developed by MedBiquitous, an ANSI-accredited standards develop for healthcare education and competence assessment. She will also review projects based on MedBiquitous standards that illustrate the impact a common infrastructure can have.
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IEEE LOM, Healthcare LOM and the need for extensions: the mEducator standard schema approach

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Although there are existing standards for describing learning objects/educational resources, the need to extend them is often inevitable. IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) and its extension Healthcare LOM were used in mEducator BPN project, as the starting point for the development of a metadata standard for the description of a wide variety of medical educational resources. Healthcare LOM, which was designed by MedBiquitous to provide for the specific demands of medical and healthcare education, was considered to be reused by mEducator in order to fill IEEE LOM’s lack on medical metadata. However, there were still some concepts missing in the aforementioned standards that are needed in order to meet mEducator’s requirements such as repurposing, citation, quality stamp, companionship, media type as well as some more specific characteristics. So, conceptually-wise the mEducator standard is an extension of existing standards. When considering of reusing parts of an existing e-learning standard it is worth looking into two criteria a) the conceptual model/data model of these standards b) their serialisation in a machine processable format (JSON, XML etc.) Regarding the serialisation of those standards in a machine processable format, both IEEE LOM and Healthcare LOM have been bided officially directly in XML. However, Resource Description Framework (RDF) was identified as the most appropriate framework to use since the metadata should be compliant with the principles of Linked Data. Dublin Core on the other hand is an e-learning standard that has been expressed in RDF/XML. Consequently, the latter was the standard that was reused in mEducator approach. In other words, mEducator reused the concepts and the serialisation format of Dublin Core and it also proposed conceptual extensions to it.
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Recent contributions to a Generic Architecture Design that supports Learning Objects Interoperability

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Adaptation and personalization services in e-learning environments are considered the turning point of recent research efforts, as the “one-size-fits-all” approach has some important drawbacks, from the educational point of view. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems in World Wide Web became a very active research field and the need of standardization arose, as the continually augmenting research efforts lacked interoperability capabilities. This presentation concentrates and classifies recent research work and notices important points that can lead to an open, modular and generic architecture of a Learning Management System based on widely accepted standards.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 17:30 to 19:00
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Transforming Medical Curricula by means of virtual patients

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This presentation will focus on the way that interactive virtual patients are being used to transform medical and healthcare curricula These tools can not only replace existing didactic and case -based styles of learning used to teach most knowledge based conventional learning but also provide additional training opportunities in for problem-solving, patient management and training against medical error. The opportunity to train problemsolving in the context of patient management, has until recently been largely ignored in early medical and healthcare training. However medical decisionmaking takes place in complex and distributed cognitive environments, and sometimes involves risk and time pressure. It is no longer enough to train students in these experiences and skills, 'on the job'. Virtual patients can be used to allow students to consider options, take decisions and experience the impact of those decisions. In this way these tools can be used to train patent management and avoidance of error. The presentation will show how these tools are used in St Georges, to transform Problem-Based learning, lectures, and for selfdirected learning and assessment, and how these computer-based scenarios can be integrated with other interactive online learning resources. Finally the presentation will consider the new opportunities that technology may bring in terms of more authentic scenarios as we move towards the personalised patient avatar.
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Serious Games in Medical Education: the story so far

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The use of serious games and gaming technology in health education and healthcare is expanding rapidly. Healthcare and medical education is one of the main application areas in the field. One critical problem in medical education is that there aren’t enough facilities for training. Serious games can assist in overcoming this burden by providing virtual facilities that make training safe, adaptive and accessible from every ware. This presentation we look at some of the leading examples of serious games in healthcare and more precisely on increasing physical activity, improving patient compliance, encouraging better personal health, improving hospital operations and providing more engaging training to healthcare professionals.
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Repurposing Serious Games: the creation and launching of a dedicated editor (mEditor and current experiences in mEducator)

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One of the key challenges in mEducator was the way to handle serious games repurposing. This has lately attracted much attention and enthusiasm, which is aligned with recent emphasis and focus on serious games in general. However, how can the scientific community share and distribute serious games or exchange experiences of their use in the educational process? In this presentation we present mEditor, a scenario editor for serious games that enables their use in medical education. The first few experiences from the endeavour will be demonstrated.
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mEducator spaces in Second Life

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Background: From its inception, the meducator program, while mandating the repurposing of educational content aimed to utilize the full scope of e-learning, from traditional electronically assisted teaching (repurposing of presentations and lecture notes) to experiential learning (i.e. virtual patients and serious gaming). Objective: Within that scope, we have begun an initiative to bring the meducator research into one of the widely known multi user virtual environments (MUVEs) Second Life (SL). Methods-Results: Towards that, we utilized our Second Life island within which we aim to implement and test the relevant meducator research in the MUVE space. At the moment our efforts are focused on two fronts. First, utilizing the SLOODLE module of the popular moodle LMS system, we are publishing repurposable educational content, namely presentations, in order to facilitate self motivated and self assisted education leveraging the inquiry based educational method. We have currently implemented a prototype radiation protection workshop facilitating self directed discovery of information within a structured “theme park” of small and thematically focused explanatory presentations. Second, we aim to create a second life “semantic tree viewer” that would allow for depiction, in the SL world, of the relations between entities as these are described in RDF/XML documents via the relevant URIs. We have utilized a third party linked data library/parser (GRAPHITE/ARC) and created a set of server side PHP and Second Life scripts enabling the depiction of the RDF triples as SL “physical” interlinked objects. Conclusions: In both fronts there is still much work to be done. In the first front we aim to create an extensive test base in order to assess the impact of the MUVE in self motivated learning, while in the semantic tree viewer front we aim to further improve parsing and visualization, along with extending the viewer into visualization of the content itself.
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A Framework for Collaborative Serious Games in OpenSim

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The presentation aims to describe a framework for creating 3D collaborative educational games by using a flexible and customizable framework on top of OpenSim open source virtual worlds’ platform. This framework supports the creation of hidden questions type games, in OpenSim’s virtual worlds, where students are divided into opposing teams and try to discover and correctly answer hidden questions. The framework created in such a way that allows easy recreation of games in different worlds and for different courses. The insertion of new questions and the configuration of its parameters are simple tasks, yet important, as the tutor can adapt the game to suit the learning objectives he wishes to succeed. To this direction we believe that this framework will be used for creating serious games for medical education.
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Friday, 6 April, 2012 - 19:30
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