An overview of the nature of the preparation of practice educators in five health care disciplines

Practice education is a core element of all educational programmes that prepare health care professionals for academic award and registration to practice. Ensuring quality and effectiveness involves partnership working between Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) and health care providers, social care communities, voluntary and independent sectors offering client care throughout the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Clearly practitioners who support, supervise and assess learners for entry to their respective professions need to be well prepared and supported in their roles as practice educators. However it would appear that the nature of this support and preparation varies across disciplines and that good practice is not easily shared. With this in mind, the Making Practice Based Learning Work (MPBLW) project aims to make practitioners more effective at supporting and supervising students in the workplace across a range of health care disciplines namely Dietetics, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy and Radiology. The Department of Employment and Learning (Northern Ireland) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England has funded this collaborative project involving staff from Ulster, Northumbria and Bournemouth Universities. The outcomes for each phase of the project are: Phase One: • Identify and document good practice on how practitioners are prepared for their educational role. Phase Two: • Develop and evaluate learning materials for use by practitioners across five health care disciplines. • Make learning materials available in a number of efficient media, e.g. paper, electronic, CD-ROM and web-based. • Develop a programme applicable to interprofessional and uniprofessional contexts. • Widen access for a multicultural workforce. Phase Three: • Embed best educational practice through the establishment of an academicpractitioner network. • Disseminate a range of materials and processes across the wider academic and health and social care communities

Developing lifelong learners: A novel online problem‐based ultrasonography subject

Online learning environments have a major role in providing lifelong learning opportunities. Lifelong learning is critical for successful participation in today's competitive work environment. This paper describes an online problem‐based learning approach to the creation of a student‐centred learning environment for the study of the biological sciences subject in the Graduate Diploma of Applied Science (Medical Ultrasonography) course at the University of Sydney. The environment is interactive and collaborative, with all communication taking place online. Students work in groups to study clinically relevant problems. A Web‐database system provides learner control in the process of knowledge acquisition, access to reference materials on the Internet and communication with the tutor and with peers through synchronous chat and asynchronous threaded discussion forums. Other online features include a protocol for problem‐solving, self‐assessment and feedback opportunities, detailed help, streaming audio and video and pre‐course, ongoing and post‐course questionnaires. This technology may be adapted to a range of disciplines and can also be utilized in on‐campus teaching