Education Fellowship Summary Report
Name: Joanne Callinan, Librarian, Milford Care Centre
Date: May 2015
Sites visited:
Week 1: Hospice UK, Macmillan UK, Loros Hospice, Leicester
Week 2: Royal College of General Practitioners, London
Overview of aims and purpose of visits
The purpose of the Education Fellowship was to visit different healthcare organisations in the UK
involved in delivering e-learning courses and to observe and gather information about the processes
and methods utilised to develop online programmes in those organisations. The sites I visited were
Hospice UK, Macmillan UK, Loros Hospice and the Royal College of General Practitioners.
I visited Hospice UK to learn more about how they have used Moodle to deliver their courses. The
CLiP programme (Current Learning in Palliative Care) gives professionals, carers and teams from a
variety of health and social care settings the knowledge and skills needed in their daily work.
In October 2014, The RCGP Essential Knowledge Update and Challenge Programme won the Gold
Award in the Best e-learning Project in the most competitive sector (third sector). This is no more
evident than by the fact that they have a dedicated team of e-learning professionals and authors.
RCGP offers a wide spectrum of E-Learning courses specifically for GPs.
Objectives developed prior to visit
I envisaged a number of outcomes during the Fellowship which will impact on my organization and
the wider palliative care community. My objectives for the visits would be to
1) Learn more about different approaches to developing e-learning courses
2) Learn about some of the software and technology used to develop online courses.
3) View examples of reflective learning as well as how e-learning can be made engaging for
learners.
4) Enhance my knowledge of the course development process
5) How quality control can be ensured during course development
Report
All of the organisations that I visited used Moodle as their Learning Management System. In Hospice
UK, tutorials and worksheets can be used by individuals or by small groups to help with developing
shared dialogue and learning. The layout of the courses is very clear and a similar approach could be
utilised to create online courses.
Macmillan UK offer many online courses to health and social care professionals, the public,
volunteers and Macmillan staff. Learn Zone provides a variety of free learning resources, online
courses and professional development tools. They have used Articulate software to create these
online programs. Learners can directly access e-learning course via the Macmillan website.
Frequently, the Macmillan courses utilise the “Lesson” or the “Book” activities within Moodle. The
advantage of using the Book activity over the Lesson is that learners can print individual pages or
chapters in a user-friendly format.
Lorus Hospice utilise Articulate Storyline to develop their online programmes. These include
Safeguarding, Information Governance, Health & Safety, Equality & Diversity. Users are divided into
four cohorts: doctors & nurses, other clinical, non-clinical patient contact, non-clinical no patient
contact. Each cohort will have a different set of mandatory training to carry out. Yellow and red are
the template colours which is consistent with the organisations website and logo. Each course has a
consistent look and feel which is the same home page with the title of the course at the top of the
page. Case studies and reflective scenarios with multiple choice questions engage learners to
facilitate learning in their courses.
Royal College of General Practitioners
The OLE is the RCGP’s elearning platform with over 60,000 registered users. It consists of over 300
hours of learning, developed in- house and with a range of public, private and not-for-profit sector
partners. Products include currently 62 eLearning Modules, the Essential Knowledge Updates and
Challenges Programme and the PEP learning needs assessment tools.
The online e-learning materials are developed by the RCGP Education and eLearning teams. Over the
past six years, the teams have developed a range of high quality RCGP online courses to support CPD
and revalidation. The intended audience are GPs and primary healthcare professionals, GP Specialty
Trainees and GP Educators.
During my visit to the RCGP, I had an opportunity to spend time with Authors, Project Officers,
Senior Web Developer, Instructional Designer, eLearning development fellows, E-Learning
Programme Manager and the Medical Director. The RCGP has approx. 50,000 members and approx.
60,000 registered e-learning users. Upon completion of the courses, certificates can be printed and
used to obtain CPD points.
A Relationship Manager will usually be the initial contact person who will engage with the partner or
organisation about the development of any potential online courses. The project team consists of
the partner organisation, the e-learning team and other stakeholders. The course development
process itself involves a multi-disciplinary team approach. The authors and E-Learning Fellows
(eLFslfs) are GPs. The E-Learning Fellows are involved in the development of a scoping document
which consists of the course title, summary, course map consisting of the educational objectives pre
and post-course assessments. Pre and post-course assessments consist of 10 multiple choice
questions.
Course creation begins and the content is drafted initially in Powerpoint. Standardised detailed
templates have been created by the Instructional Designers to facilitate the process. The
Instructional Designer creates the 1st draft of the storyboard in conjunction with the author and this
is reviewed by the eLearning Development Fellow. The storyboard is sent for review to the project
team. At this point, each page should look as close as possible to how it will appear on screen.
Graphics are finalised by the Instructional Designer and the learning objectives checked. A
copyeditor checks against editorial standards, grammar and spelling. The eLearning Fellow and
Medical Director sign off on the course content. The course is created using Articulate Storyline
software from the finalised content storyboard. The eLF checks the course and changes are only
made if absolutely necessary. A technical review is carried out by the instructional designer. A final
clinical review and sign off is carried out by the Medical Director.
The Course Lesson is consistent across all courses contains 1) Title of the lesson 2) Overview:
Estimated time, Author and Curriculum 3) Description 4) Objectives. You can also access the
Learning Sessions which consists of the Pre-Course Assessment, Course Lesson, Post-Course
Assessment, Course References and Acknowledgements. This is consistent across all of the courses.
Essential Knowledge Updates Programme (EKU)
The EKU Programme was the first e-learning resource to be produced by the Royal College of
General Practitioners in 2008. The EKU provides GPs and trainees with a comprehensive
programme of high quality, interactive educational modules that highlight new evidence and
guidance of relevance to clinical practice, over a 6 months period.
Each EKU release consists of 8 major modules and 20 briefings that deliver a concise synthesis of the
most important new and changing information derived from a rigorous literature search of the
preceding six months. This includes guidelines, gold standards, research papers and articles that
have direct impact on general practice and evidence based patient care.
The Essential Knowledge Updates are developed in-house by the Education Team. The educational
content for major modules is are initially drafted by EKU authors and proof-read by the Education
project officer who also checks images to ensure copyright is attained. It is then sent to the EKU
Development Fellow who is responsible for quality assurance and sends feedbacks to the EKU
authors. The authors summarise learning and practice points and suggest ways to reflect on and
compare a GP’s own practice against the standards and best practice described, and give practical
tips to implement the learning for the benefit of patient care.
The briefings (minor topics) provide a short summary of relevant published evidence, with a link to
the original article. The topics are varied, informative and highlight areas across the curriculum that
affect clinical practice now or that might change clinical practice in the near future. Once the content
is built in Moodle, a final quality assurance is undertaken by the Editorial Board.
The educational content in the EKU Programme is organised into curriculum-based modules and
sessions. The EKU Programme currently covers 92% of the GP Curriculum.
To accompany the Updates, the Essential Knowledge Challenges (EKC) are released three months
later. Each Challenge is a 50-item self-assessment knowledge test, containing single-best answer,
photo format and multiple-best answer questions. Challenges are written by a group of the RCGP
experts. Learners can choose to take an EKC before or after completing the associated update.
Additional resources, such as EKU Podcasts and Screencasts, are available to compliment the core
content of the programme. The EKU podcasts are based on the topics included within an Update
and provide an opportunity for the authors to discuss the most important educational messages of
the module thereby adding a further dimension to the learning experience.
EKU Screencasts - By viewing/listening to the EKU content of the screencasts users are able to learn
about the modules as well as gain an additional insight into the topic itself through the commentary
provided by the presenter, an expert with extensive knowledge within the field.
Outcomes achieved as a result of visit
Having visited different organisations in the UK involved in the delivery of e-learning programmes for
healthcare professionals, there are many steps in the E-Learning process consisting of both content
and e-learning/IT specialists. Engagement with stakeholders is particularly important in developing
e-learning courses as well as ensuring that the courses are centred on learning and applicable to
clinical practice.
Technology is continually changing and creating relevant courses which are easily accessible and
user-friendly to the target audience is essential. Understanding the difference between delivering elearning and face-to-face courses is required when developing e-learning programmes. It is more
beneficial to deliver multiple short sessions approx. 20-30 minutes max.
Many individuals in the organisations I visited spoke about the importance and requirement of
adding subtitles to videos they produced so that they were accessible to those with hearing
difficulties. Also, there are accessibility challenges in many organisations where individuals cannot
listen to audio at their workstations or don’t have sound cards or headsets readily available. These
must also be considered when creating E-Learning materials. Another way of improving accessibility
of audio materials is to provide a link to the transcript. Consistency in layout and design across all
learning sessions is evident and aids navigation within the courses.
Outputs to be delivered as a result of visit
1. Presentation of report at AIIHPC symposium
2. Presentation of report at Milford Care Centre (education session)
3. Article submitted to e-Hospice
4. Links formed with organisations involved in e-learning such as Hospice UK, RCGP, Macmillan UK,
Loros Hospice and e-ELCA.
5. Explore opportunities for research into this area.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to the AIIHPC for funding this Education Fellowship. I would like to thank each organisation
for facilitating my visit and to each person I spoke to during these visits. Thank you for sharing your
time, knowledge and perspectives on e-learning.