Projects

Recent funding from the European Commission, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) is supporting the repurposing and enrichment of our existing online learning materials. Below is a list of some of the projects and programmes that we are involved in:

Virtual Worlds
	SGUL have been looking at virtual worlds, in particular Second Life, for a number of projects. Our main interest has been to deliver virtual patients as problem based learning scenarios; these projects include PREVIEW, G4 and PIVOTE. The PREVIEW Project recently won the Time Hight Education award for "outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year. " **Our island is free for all to visit and the orientation maze has been a particular interest for new comers of Second Life.
PIVOTE
	PIVOTE is a virtual learning authoring system for virtual worlds. It was developed as part of the JISC funded PREVIEW project. PIVOTE is based on the Medbiquitous Virtual Patient standard the system could be used for any sort of structured learning in virtual worlds. The key point about PIVOTE is that all the structure and information content of an exercise is stored on the web, not in the virtual world. This means that it is easy to create, and then edit and maintain, courseware INDEPENDENT OF VIRTUAL WORLD. And since even structure and content are separate you can have the same exercise but with different levels of student information - from loads of help and structure for beginners, to minimal information and structure for assessment purposes.
Generation 4 (G4) - the next generation in PBL
	G4 is a 2-Year project co-funded by the JISC to use recently developed technologies to assist in the creation of a more interactive and integrated model for curriculum delivery in medicine.
mEducator (Multi-type Content Repurposing and Sharing in Medical Education)
	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.
REViP (Repurposing Existing Virtual Patients)
	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. This project officially started in March 2008 and is due to finish in February 2009.
PREVIEW
	Problem-based Learning (PBL) has become a central learning approach in many curricula, but in collaborative style of learning is threatened by the movement towards more self-directed and distance learning. This community of practice of PBL users wishes to investigate and evaluate a more user-focused approach, linking the amerging teachnologies of virtual worlds with interactive PBL online, to create immersive collaborative tutorials. The project team will create (i) specific PBL environments within Second Life, (ii) PBL scenarios (iii) strategies, guidance materials and good practice guides, all of which will be evaluated under the guidance of users, and made available to the higher education community.
eViP (European Virtual Patients Programme)
	eViP is a 3-year programme co-funded by the European Union to create a bank of repurposed and enriched multicultural virtual patient cases from across Europe. The programme officially started in September 2007 and is due to finish in September 2010.
Virtual Patients
	The e-Learning Unit at St George’s University of London are involved in a number of different projects to develop and evaluate virtual patients (VPs) for their applicability in a medical and healthcare programme.
Clinical Skills Online (CSO)
	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.
REHASH (Re-purposing Existing Heathcare Assets to Share)
	REHASH (Repurposing Health Assets to Share) is a Regional JISC-funded project to re-purpose in-house web-based teaching materials to a range of different educational levels. It is intended to support student progress from further to higher education in medicine and healthcare, and is specifically targeted at courses which widen access to higher education, and the diploma and undergraduate programmes which follow these courses.