Simulated Practice Showcase – July 2017 Report

It has been a year since the City Wide Simulated Practice showcase started, by Neal Sumner (LEaD) and Janet Hunter (School of Health Sciences). Since then, we have had termly meetings and an ever expanding selection of examples of simulation. This month, saw the summer 2017 gathering of the group on 11th July, where we had for the first time all School represented and was once again hosted by Professor Clive Holtham and Janet Hunter.

Gill Harrison – School of Health Sciences

First to present was Gill Harrison, who described how role play is used to improve the soft skills of radiographers, using the low-fi approach of sticky notes! She explained the challenges of this way of teaching, including some role plays being more realistic, some students not talking enough and staff not having enough time in the curricula at the School to implement more of this approach. Can technologies that simulate scenario based learning (Clark, 2013) be the answer, who should create these?

Captain Tilmann Gabriel – School of Mathematics, Computer Science & Engineering

Next to present was Captain Tilmann Gabriel, from the School of Mathematics, Computer Science & Engineering, who described what simulation means to the aviation industry, who spend millions to avoid aviation disasters. .

He ended with showing the video below of Hudson River Plane Landing, illustrating what simulations that pilots have to deal with.

Jonathan Hewett – School of Arts and Social Sciences

Jonathan Hewitt, a Journalism Lecturer, new to this group, described how the TV or Radio interview is the focus of simulation in Journalism and that students like to interview famous people or members of the public and produce journalistic artefacts that are authentic as possible, which through technologies nowadays is possible, that maybe 20 years ago was not, when equipment was expensive and social media and other publishing platforms were not available. It was great to hear from an area of the university we don’t normally here from, with a great talk, full of pedaogogical value to the audience!

Edward Iredale – City Law School

Finally we had Edward Iredale from City’s Law School, who talked about the scenario of negotiation in law, that is simulated. It gives students the chance to practice skills that they need in the legal workplace.

The 4 Dimensions of Simulated Practice – Professor Clive Holtham – Exercise for the Group

We also had Professor Clive Holtham asking the participants to think about scenarios and the 4 dimensions of simulated practice, which he defined as learning impact, fidelity, creation resources (inc cost), usuage resources (inc cost and student effort).

The scenarios the groups were asked to consider were as follows:

  1. Task Trainer Simulation
  2. Manikin-based Simulation
  3. Standardized Client Simulation
  4. Virtual Reality Simulation
  5. Roleplay Simulation: Online and Analogue
  6. Intensive professional challenge (including in-tray)
  7. Serious gaming
  8. Model building

This list is not exhaustive, but you can see that many disciplines at the University would fit into some or all of these types of simulations.

Academics discuss the simulated practice scenarios put to them by Clive Holtham

Clive reminded us that not all simulated practice has to be high fidelity in order to make an impact in learning and that much of what we already do as a institution may be considered as simulated practice, depending on your defintion of simulated practice.

We plan to put some of these examples and presentations into a Moodle module for next academic year, so that we can create a community, share practice and staff interested in this area, can also dip in and view the resources and discussions. There will be another showcase event in the autumn term, possibly as a short BYOL (Bring Your Own Lunch) webinar for 1 hour in November or December.

If you’d like any help or support developing simulated practice ideas in your programme or module, please contact LEaD

Are there examples of simulated practice in your own context that you can share? Please use the comments section below or create a blog post yourself, please contact the blog group.

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