eLearning Unit (ELU)

Welcome

The eLearning Unit (ELU) was established in 2005Â to deliver a high quality elearning experience to its students, and to create first class research and development groups, focussed chiefly on innovation and international collaboration in the field of virtual patients.

eLU has three distinct research and development groupings: e-innovation, curriculum development, and international projects, all of which attract grant funding. eLU collaborates with approximately 30 educational institutions worldwide, including institutions and organisations of the calibre of Karolinska, Maastricht, Munich, Johns Hopkins, MedBiquitous and the Open University. Increasing prioritisation has been given to publication, with seven papers published in 2009, when eLU also received the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding ICT Innovation

e-Learning Award 2010 (Shortlist)
“Best Learning Game, Simulation or Virtual Environment” category.
“E-learning internal project team of the year” category.

Curriculum Transformation Workshop

The eLearning Unit will be hosting a workshop on Curriculum Transformation using Scenario based Learning on 5th and 6th December 2011.

Further details will be published shortly, if you have any questions in the mean time please contact Trupti Jivram on tjivram@sgul.ac.uk.

eViP

eViP stands for Electronic Virtual Patients. These electronic resources play a vital role in teaching medicine and other healthcare professions.

The aim of the eViP programme is to create a repository, or bank of 320 repurposed and enriched virtual patients, which have been made available under a Creative Commons License.

St George’s, University of London (SGUL) is the lead co-ordinator for the eViP programme. The eLearning Unit (ELU) at SGUL led the  ‘pilot study’ and the overall management of the programme.

Virtual Worlds

The e-learning unit has been carrying out a number of projects within the virtual world ‘Second Life’, and are always looking into other virtual worlds and tools to deliver online resources such as virtual patients. St George’s University now has two islands within the Second Life virtual world, one which is open for public access and the other which is private for delivering virtual patient learning scenarios to students.

The growing commitment in developing these innovative learning resources were recognised by the Time Higher Education who awarded the e-learning unit for the Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year award in 2009. They have also been short listed in the Best Learning Game, Simulation or Virtual Environment category for the e-Learning Award 2010.

Clinical Skills Online

Clinical Skills Online (CSO) is aimed at providing online videos demonstrating core procedural and communication skills common to a wide range of medical and health-based courses. This was a project that was orginally funded by the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine but is now supported by St George’s. These videos are freely available to anyone using them for educational, personal and non-commercial purposes.

Best Poster Award Runner Up, AMEE 2007

iEthiCS

iEthiCS is a novel, state-of-the-art ethics virtual patient scenario that aims to revolutionise medical ethics education in the UK and abroad for both staff and patients, at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Educationally flexible, easy-to-use, and fun, this high-tech video case sets the gold standard for the delivery of realistic case-based and clinically contextualised ethics and law education.

The project outputs include the first ever openly-available interactive video VP for medical ethics training, and a number of other tutor and students resources. The outputs were formally launched at the 2010 World Congress of Bioethics in Singapore, as shown on the right.

ALT-Epigeum Award 2010
Finalist for Most Effective Use of Video.

REViP

REViP is a one year project co-funded by the JISC to explore and evaluate the embedding of repurposed and enriched Virtual Patients (VPs) within a Paediatrics component in the St George’s medical curriculum.

The major outputs from the project include 6 openly available VPs, a video case study outlining the repurposing process from Germany to the UK (as shown on the right), and a number of other key deliverables. A key outcome was that repurposing proved an efficient process for transforming content from one healthcare culture to another if structures of the cases were similar.

The G4 Project

mEducator

The mEducator Best Practice Network (BPN) aims to implement and critically evaluate existing standards and reference models in the field of e-learning in order to enable specialized state-of-the-art medical educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared and re-used across European higher academic institutions.