Epic Think Tank
Health and e-learning
Part 2: Opportunities and practicalities
It was felt unwise to over-emphasise the challenge of 'e'. Most
of the issues it raises are already issues within the NHS and being
worked through, to varying degrees, as part of existing drives towards
modernisation from within the Service itself.
The discussion moved therefore to identifying opportunities that
the existence of e-learning creates positively to impact these issues,
and the practicalities of doing so.
Saving cost through increased efficiency was felt by one delegate
at least to be a necessary (if not sufficient) outcome for the adoption
of e-learning ('that would satisfy me - and probably the Secretary
of State as well!'). And on a simple fiscal level, e-learning has
the power to bring immediate efficiencies to bear in avoiding
duplications within a system.
Rather than thousands of medical students crowding around hundreds
of patients' beds in locations around the country, why not use the
power of film and video to 'capture' just one patient encounter
as a learning object, to be reused time and time again?
While there are obvious cost savings to be made in terms of people
time in this example, the argument was not solely about cost - a
significant quality gain was seen to be available from capturing
the 'best' possible patient… examined by the most outstanding consultant
in his or her field… In other words, 'do it right once and duplicate
a million times'.
In business terms, this would be described as leveraging one's
knowledge assets, a principle very much in operation in the IVIMEDS
model.
In that model, participants in an e-learning system are not only
producers but also consumers of learning objects. With this in mind,
discussion turned to the subject of authoring. In order to
make such a model work, it was asked, what sort of teams needed
to be put in place, with what sort of technologies?
The ideal, it seemed, would be a system in which those with the
required knowledge were able to author learning objects directly.
However several practical impediments get in the way of this happening.
The present 'clunkiness' of authoring tools was seen as causing
a bottleneck, requiring the use of intermediaries. Above and beyond
the question of technical ability, some sort of editorial skills
were also though to be necessary: 'the person who has the knowledge
isn't always the best person to decide how that knowledge is communicated'.
Then there was the question of incentivising the sharing of knowledge
by SMEs for whom this is not a core role: 'If you don't see your
job as primarily a tutor, it will be seen as a substitution for
what you actually do'.
Neither was the use of wholly inhouse teams seen as a particularly
advisable way to proceed. This had been the early pattern of e-learning
adoption in the corporate sphere, however the perception of the
panellists (who included a number with extensive corporate experience)
was that none of those teams existed anymore. Where had that expertise
gone? It was mooted that the best people in inhouse teams tend to
leave often doing their own thing - prompting the prediction that
you could depopulate areas of medical education pretty quickly by
spending money on growing the necessary skills inhouse!
Technology featured fairly strongly in this stage of the
discussion, as the practicalities of implementing e-learning brought
it increasingly to the fore. Worries were voiced that IT strategy
in the NHS did not show a commitment to building a learning organisation.
It was envisaged that uses of leading-edge knowledge capturing
and sharing mechanisms envisaged in this discussion might raise
issues around ownership of information not currently within the
scope of that strategy.
In any case, both on the question of bandwidth limitations and
the undeveloped nature of current authoring tools, no-one around
the table was proposing to wait for technology to catch up. The
issues were too urgent for that.
It was observed that, for the first time in recent years, the imagination
of organisational leaders such as those around the table was beginning
to outstrip the ability of technology to deliver. We could be said
to be at a stage analogous to the 'wooden block' era of printing.
…In fact a plethora of further comparisons from technological history
dotted the discussion, as various panellists strove to achieve a
clear view of where we currently are in e-learning.
It was pointed out that the modern training industry had emerged
as recently as World War 2, driven by the need to train a
lot of people rapidly in a situation where subject matter expertise
was scarce in many industries due to the war…
E-learning was said to be 'the production line of education', in
the same way that Ford rationalised the production of motor
cars…
…And the continued large-scale production of films in Hollywood
came up - as a perhaps cautionary example of how a traditional medium
can survive its apparent supplanting by more advanced upstarts (in
this case, TV, Home Video and DVD). Film's continued popularity
is clearly due to the fact that it is a community experience, but
could this have been predicted by theorising? The subtleties of
what people like about a particular delivery medium are often less
than obvious.
With ideas (as well as images) beginning to teem, attention turned
to what particular areas of training and knowledge management could
form an immediate focus for initiatives with the aim of establishing
e-learning within the NHS.
To put it more simply: where are the 'quick wins'?
Next>>
Background
Part 1 Challenges of 'e' to tradition
Part 3 Looking for 'quick wins'
Afterword
|
