Informal learning for medical students

Cimex produces a new e-learning resource for medical students that brings professional guidance to life.

One of the key functions of the General Medical Council is to set the standards and outcomes of basic medical education in the UK, covering undergraduates and trainee medical professionals. To do this, the Council publishes Medical students: professional values and fitness to practise to inform medical students of their professional responsibilities as future doctors.

Following our well-received and highly successful work with the GMC on the GMP in Action interactive web resource, Cimex was asked to work with them again on a site that puts this professional advice into context and bring it to life online.

Solution

The Professional Values in Action resource, launched in November 2010, is built in Flash 10 and uses a number of different types of learning interactivity to reinforce the key learning points of the guidance and allow learners to see professional values in action. These include:

• scenarios where a learner takes the role of a medical student to tackle some common dilemmas
• another set of scenarios where a learner plays the role of a member of staff at a medical school to deal with some of the common problems they face when working with medical students
• animated comic strips that tell stories that contain one mistake that a user has to identify
• a quiz that lets learners test themselves and recap what they have learned by completing the previous exercises

Our approach

As with many of the interactive solutions that we provide to clients, the e-learning specialists at Cimex managed the whole production lifecycle of this resource, from the initial definition of the project.s requirements and proof of concept, all the way through to the final deployment and launch of the resource.

We took the GMC.s excellent creative brief and were able to deliver a site which met their expectations.

In addition to this project management and constant refinement to the resource according to regular client feedback, we also:

• created simple, yet effective illustrations for the comic strip task
• ran and managed a series of photoshoots to produce all the imagery needed for the resource
• produced all the voiceovers and commentary that is used across the e-learning resource
• ensured that the design of the resource integrated with the look and feel of the GMC.s existing website and other online learning modules

The results

Peter Markham, Web Editor at the GMC said: ‘We thought that case studies, spot the mistake cartoon strips and a quiz would work really well on a website – and having worked with Cimex before we knew they would do a good job of implementation’

‘The creative ideas and excellent writing of the GMC – combined with the very strong design, project management and technical work done by Cimex – have resulted in a website we are delighted with. Thanks to Cimex for work of a very high standard.’

Tags: E learning