Better Learning - Better Care

Abstract

E-learning is a common used education method within different types of organization, as well in the medical sector. Both nurses and physicians are obligated, partly by law and partly by the medical institutions, to take examinations to maintain their accreditation confirming they are qualified and competent to use medical devices. The Competence Group, together with different medical centers, develops medical equipment e-learning to facilitate nurses and physicians with the knowledge and skills needed to pass these examinations. The e-learning modules are based on protocols and device manuals, resulting in a gap between the knowledge and skill acquired from the e-learning and daily practice. This gap causes a low level of motivation among medical employees to use the e-learning. Therefore the aim of this project was to develop a game-based generic addition for medical equipment e-learning, which increases the motivation of the end users, by decreasing the gap between daily practice and e-learning. In order to gain insights in the context of the assignment a literature research into e-learning, adult learning, game-based learning, motivation, and social interaction is performed. A product analysis of the medical equipment e-learning of The Competence Group and its main competitors resulted in an overview of the strong and weak characteristics of the e-learning, and different field researches were performed to sensitize with the target group. The results of these explorations were used to create a vision to support the design phase. The main aspects of this vision are: * The focus will be on social interaction between nurses. * The e-learning should stimulate a self-directed process and focus on life-centered and goal-oriented learning. * Game-elements contributing to competition, collaboration, exploration, or story telling should be used to increase the motivation for using e-learning. An interaction vision was created to describe the intended interaction the new generic addition should stimulate. The interaction vision is as follows: The generic addition to medical equipment e-learning should enable nurses to socially interact with each other during learning. The nurses should not only become engaged in their own learning process, but also in the learning process of other nurses. After a creative exploration two concept directions were created: ‘challenge a colleague’ and ‘share your personal experience’. Only ‘share your personal experience’ was chosen for further development, which resulted in two paper prototypes that were evaluated with seven nurses of the Maastricht University Medical Center. Based on this evaluation the final design ‘My experience’ was created. ‘My experience’ is a new e-learning module that focuses on sharing personal experiences from daily practice. The learner is asked to choose a medical device and share an experience about a situation that could have had serious consequences, but was somehow intervened by him and/or a colleague. The chosen device should play a role in the situation. Sharing the experience can be done using six multiple-choice questions and six open questions. During answering the questions a visualization of the given answers is shown. After sharing the personal experience the learner is provided with two experiences of colleagues about the same device. An overview of these experiences is given, and after reading them the learner has to indicate to which extent this situation is happened or could happen to him too. Up next, the learner can send an automated message to the writer to inform him about the fact his experience is read. All experiences shared will be stored in a database which could be used by the learners to search for specific experiences. The final design was evaluated with nurses using a digital prototype of ‘My experience’ to research the effect of the new module on the motivation and to test the final design on its usability. The fact that the module asks for personal experiences and provides the possibility to read experiences of others was appreciated and indicated as being instructive by the nurses. They were motivated and felt even obligated to share their experiences, but the module was also seen as extra work, since ‘My experience’ does not contain the theoretical information asked during the obligated examination for maintaining the accreditation. ‘My experience’ can be seen as a first step towards a new type of e-learning. The experiences shared during the coming year(s), could form the grid for the development of more practical and daily practice based e-learning in the future. Making this goal very clear to the nurses during the implantation of ‘My experience’ will contribute to their motivation for using the new module.