NHS South Central E-learning

'No needless hunger or thirst'

2008-08-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

The NHS Core Learning Unit's long awaited 'Food, Nutrition and Hydration for health and social care' programme has recently been launched. NHS South Central are the designated sponsor for promoting this programme and we have begun to do so through the SHA's nutrition 'no needless hunger or thirst' workstream.

I attended the first Education and Engagement group set up to progress this workstream yesterday. A very engaging and productive session chaired by Gillian Prager, Director of Clinical Standards & Engagement at Milton Keynes PCT, and attended by dietitians (must spell it correctly, else I may offend!! LOL), nutritionists, speech and language therapists and others keen to see the topic of nutrition raised up the agenda.

This is an emotive topic for me personally. The importance of ensuring patients are adequately fed and watered should surely be central to their care and ensuring a speedy recovery. I am really very pleased to be part of this group, despite my contribution being small.

The group formed some high-level objectives, one of which I will be helping to contribute to:

All carers (paid/unpaid) will have mandatory nutrition education and training.

Doctors Induction continued

2008-06-13T00:21:00.000-07:00

Progress is being made with the standardisation of doctors induction across the Wessex deanery. A further meeting took place this week to review where we were at. A number of training matrices have been collected from Trusts and PCTs in the region and collated: there's still a few outstanding. This is beginning to build a picture of what content could possibly be delivered/made available centrally to help organisations respond to the challenge of transferability of learning, standardisation and monitoring of training activity for NHSLA risk management standards. Where applicable, e-learning is being considered.

E-learning for Healthcare (e-LfH), one of the national providers supported and funded by the DH, gave a presentation of their workforce development modules due for release in August this year. The deanery group have reviewed a number of the modules in detail and believe the content to be fit for purpose but there were initial concerns over the usability of the programs. This has since been addressed by e-lfh following our feedback; they have devised new course templates which will be applied to the material in time for their August release.

A long silence, a short summary

2008-06-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

Phew! It's been a couple of weeks since I've last blogged, so I shall summarise a few of the latest activities just to give you a flavour of what has been happening...

Heather Penny has now joined the ESR team as 'National NLMS Account Manager', she will be ensuring the successful rollout of the NLMS pilots and subsequent rollouts from September. Helen and I have both established clear communciation channels between Heather and ourselves as well as with the wider ESR team. I will be attending the initial pilot meetings set up by Heather to help provide support to Oxford Radcliffe and Berkshire Healthcare, and we will both attending monthly conference calls with the SHA ESR lead, Josh & Pieter.

NESC have purchased a server to provide an Internet-facing content server for NHS Organisations across South Central who wish to make local e-learning content available via the NLMS. This is being tested by our pilot organisations. It is hoped that this will save organisations the cost of purchasing this facility at a local level, make sharing easier, and save a great deal of duplication of effort.

The NLMS launch event for HR directors took place at Oracle, Reading on the 22 May. And the next launch event for Learning & Development leads is coming up on the 24th June. I hope to see you there.

I presented at the IT Leads meeting earlier this week regarding support for e-learning initiatives and the required minimum specification of organisational infrastructure to view courses such as the Core Learning Unit and E-learning for Health. The leads were fully supportive of the need to ensure equipment is capable of delivering the courses and have been given the detailed specifications for all national e-learning content and invited to comment if they believe there may be difficulties in doing this.

...and the NESC e-learning strategy is progressing.

Core Learning Unit: How to Run Usage Reports

2008-05-16T07:38:00.000-07:00

I hosted NESC's first ever webinar yesterday. The topic was 'Core Learning Unit: how to run usage reports'. Our featured presenters were Nicola Buckland, Learning Support Manager at the NHS Core Learning Unit (CLU), and Lee-Anne Smith, Programme Marketing Manager for Intuition (who now hosts the CLU learning resources).

We were joined by 8 attendees from across the South Central patch.

Nicola kicked off with some background history about the CLU, followed by a live demonstration of how to run a basic usage report from the legacy Serco platform. Due to a few limitations to the web conferencing software we were unable to demonstrate the 'export to excel' functionality. Unphased by this technical hiccup, the webinar continued with Lee-Anne demonstrating the reporting functionality of the Intuition system which is clearly much more comprehensive. Then the floor was opened up to the participants.

A recording of the webinar is available upon request. Due to data protection issues, I am unable to post this in the public domain as initially anticipated.

Initial feedback from participants has mostly been positive, with comments expressing that they found the approach easy to use. Here are a few of the things participants liked the most about the webinar:

"I could gain knowledge without leaving my desk"
"Very flexible - much better than taking time away from a busy schedule to attend a meeting off site"
"Friendly and informative"

I am planning to arrange a rolling programme of webinars relating to e-learning in the NHS. So, your comments for future topics would be welcome. Keep an eye on the NESC website for forthcoming events.

Managing Induction for Doctors in Training

2008-04-29T04:00:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday I attended the first of two sessions 'Managing Induction for Doctors in Training' led by Dr Ray Vieweg, Clinical Tutor and Consultant Psychiatrist at Portsmouth City PCT.

The aim of the first session was to explore the potential for a shared approach to induction for doctors in training in the Psychiatric Services across the Wessex School with a view to developing a shared programme for induction.

In attendance were colleagues from NESC, a number of Consultants, medical personnel, trainee and HR personnel.

There was a consensus that certain essential training modules could be standardised and made available centrally to avoid duplication of training and to achieve transferability of learning cross-organisationally throughout the Wessex School. In fact, the focus of most discussion centred around learning that was not specific to Psychiatry but to all doctors in training, and in some cases, across other professions.

A starting point at least is to begin somewhere: and psychiatry are a keen group.

The deanery was seen as the key enabler to this piece of work and in fact work has already begun to look at training matrices and standardising the approach to induction. A meeting between myself, Karen Nugent and Kerry Brown at the deanery is taking place on 7 May to look at the matrices, identify topics that are suitable for a shared approach (topics for the orange bit! see Ray's presentation) and whether any of these could be met through the use of e-learning.

Click here to view Ray's presentation

Novelty blogging from Leeds

2008-04-16T09:57:00.000-07:00

Please humour me... I have been armed with a blackberry and i have set up an email address that publishes to my blog from wherever i am.
i am in leeds today ...well im just pulling away from the station actually. I have been to visit our colleagues from NHS Yorkshire and Humber and NW SHA to explore a potential partnership project for embedding elearning and engaging staff in elearning at all levels within individual NHS organisations. It looks likely to be an exciting venture and one that will provide the resource for you to facilitate change to support your elearning agendas. Watch this space... :-)

Nelson Mandela is dead!

2008-04-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

Helen and I attended The University of Winchester Learning and Teaching Day 2008. The theme for the event was 'Gold Blend - Pedagogy and E-learning'.

The day began with a keynote speech entitled 'Perspectives on pedagogy and eLearning' presented by Professor Tom Boyle, Director of Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI) from the London Metropolitan University. The London Metropolitan University are one of three universities that form the UK Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Reusable Learning Objects (CETL RLO): the others are Nottingham and Cambridge. The CETL RLO provide access to nearly 200 reusable learning objects (RLOs) and they are freely available for all. Each RLO undergoes substantial evaluation with students and tutors alike, with a strong pedagogical focus on the design. The RLOs can be downloaded and reused within your own online learning environment or for use within training sessions.

Professor Tom Boyle described the development process for creation of an RLO as one that is heavily focussed on extensive collaboration directly with tutors, lecturers and students: a process that is inclusive, iterative and extremely creative. Interestingly, Nottingham University were awarded the contract to develop the RLOs for the NHS Leadership Improvement Guides which will be available from the NHS Elearning Repository later this year. The Nottingham 'arm' of the CETL have produced a vast amount of RLOs on Health and Social Science topics. I have been lucky enough to have experienced their development process first-hand with my involvement in the development of the improvement leadership guide RLOs. It is a model I would encourage for any organisation looking to develop online content.

One rather exciting development by the CETL is their GLOs - Generative Learning Objects!!

Stick with me now!!! I know there's an overload of acronyms here.

What the CETL discovered after much research and development, was that the RLOs weren't actually as reusable as they initially thought. Yes, the objects could be reused by anybody wishing to reuse them but they could not be repurposed without a team of developers to hand. They had identified that there was weak support for repurposing the objects and local adaptation. This is where the new GLO comes in...

The GLO is designed to separate the content from the design, thus making the pedagogical pattern or template reusable for different scenarios.

The CETL have developed a free tool to repurpose their GLOs called GLO-Maker which is a WYSIWIG authoring tool. I found myself thinking "So what! there's plenty of tools on the market that can do that - show me something new!" ...What differs with their tool is that it includes a variety of ready-made storyboards and templates that have been fully research, evaluated and found to be pedagogically sound. Now you're talking! I promptly pricked up my ears, sat up in my chair and took notes furiously. The full version of GLO-Maker will be available mid June - and I for one can't wait to get my hands on it. The tool will be free and will output SCORM compliant content.

As for Nelson Mandela is dead...well, I'm sure you know its not true but it hopefully got your attention anyhow. Lecturers from the University of Winchester gave individual demonstrations of their use of technology to enhance their teaching: which included use of their new 'Learning Network' VLE (based on Moodle) as well as game-based simulation environments. Chris Horrie gave a demonstration of 'News City', their virtual newsroom that places the user in a high pressure online environment that simulates a real-life newsroom. The user, or would-be journalist, can only declare Nelson Mandela is dead when they hear it from a confirmed source http://virtualnewsroom.co.uk

My secondment has been extended!!!

2008-04-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

Well... I am really pleased to write that my secondment with NESC has been extended for a further year. - and full time too!

So, I've decided to document my journey in an attempt to keep you up-to-date with everything that is going on behind the scenes. This is my debut at blogging so please bear with me ...despite the fact that it doesn't seem that different to writing a diary, something I did keep up for 5 years once upon a time (what a great read they make now!! LOL).

Anyway, as you've probably noticed - the podcasts from last Thursday's event are available below (simply click on the post's title). For those of you that have iTunes, you will be able to subscribe to the NESC podcasts - it will automatically download new podcasts as and when they become available.

For those of you that attended, I hope you all enjoyed last Thursday as much as I did. I am really looking forward to playing a part in bringing everyone together to share good practice, ideas and resources where possible. I am still writing my final report and it will be available by early next week.

Helen and I haven't wasted any time since the event. The following day we visited Caroline Chipperfield who has helped us to identify which groups we need to attend to engage HR Directors and Nursing Directors from each NHS organisation within South Central.

Marion Waite - Best practice guidance for blended learning approaches to CPD for health care staff

2008-04-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

Marion's presentation from the 2nd NESC E-learning Event 27 March 2008.

Alison Wright - E-learning Scoping Exercise for NHS South Central: results and recommendations

2008-04-02T12:39:00.000-07:00

My presentation from the 2nd NESC E-learning Event 27 March 2008.

Angie Clarke - NLH E-learning Object Repository

2008-04-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Angie Clarke's presentation from the 2nd NESC E-learning Event on 27 March 2008.