Eliciting Co-Creation Best Practices of Virtual Reality Reusable e-Resources

Immersive experiential technologies find fertile grounds to grow and support healthcare education. Virtual, Augmented, or Mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) have proven to be impactful in both the educational and the affective state of the healthcare student’s increasing engagement. However, there is a lack of guidance for healthcare stakeholders on developing and integrating virtual reality resources into healthcare training. Thus, the authors applied Bardach’s Eightfold Policy Analysis Framework to critically evaluate existing protocols to determine if they are inconsistent, ineffective, or result in uncertain outcomes, following systematic pathways from concepts to decision-making. Co-creative VR resource development resulted as the preferred method. Best practices for co-creating VR Reusable e-Resources identified co-creation as an effective pathway to the prolific use of immersive media in healthcare education. Co-creation should be considered in conjunction with a training framework to enhance educational quality. Iterative cycles engaging all stakeholders enhance educational quality, while co-creation is central to the quality assurance process both for technical and topical fidelity, and tailoring resources to learners’ needs. Co-creation itself is seen as a bespoke learning modality. This paper provides the first body of evidence for co-creative VR resource development as a valid and strengthening method for healthcare immersive content development. Despite prior research supporting co-creation in immersive resource development, there were no established guidelines for best practices

Virtual reality reusable e-resources for clinical skills training: a mixed-methods evaluation

Virtual reality has long existed, but its wider adoption in education is recent. Studies informed by theoretical underpinned co-creation frameworks and utilization of theoretical informed evaluations are scarce in literature. Thus, this study internationally evaluated the efficacy of three virtual reality reusable e-resources (VRReRs), co-created based on the ASPIRE framework, for teaching clinical skills to university students. The study followed a mixed-methods approach, combining SUS, SUS Presence Questionnaire, TAM, and UTAUT2 with a focus group discussion. Additionally, for one VRReR, a quantitative pre/post evaluation of knowledge and comparison with lecture notes followed. Results demonstrated moderately to highly usability, effectively facilitated a strong sense of presence, confidence while using them, and willingness to continue using VRReRs in the future, while increased knowledge of the learners, highlighted their effectiveness. Although some usability issues were identified, these were considered easy to address. This work evidence, in an international context, that co-created VR resources are highly acceptable and effective, similar to other types of digital or traditional resources developed through participatory inquiry paradigm. By leveraging the benefits of VR technology, VRReRs have the potential to transform and enhance the learning experience in the field of clinical skills, ultimately advancing the digitalization of higher education

Towards a modular language curriculum for using tasks

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-supported language teaching (TSLT) are often seen as incompatible as they draw on different theories of language learning and language teaching. The position adopted in this article, however, is that both approaches are needed especially in instructional contexts where ‘pure’ task-based teaching may be problematic for various reasons. The article makes a case for a modular curriculum consisting of separate (i.e. non-integrated) task-based and structure-based components. Different curriculum models are considered in the light of what is known about how a second language is learned. The model that is proposed assumes the importance of developing fluency first. It consists of a primary task-based module implemented with focus-on-form (Long, 1991) and, once a basic fluency has been achieved, supported by a secondary structural module to provide for explicit accuracy-oriented work to counteract learned selective attention (N. Ellis, 2006): one of the main sources of persistent error. The article also addresses the content and grading of the task-based and structural modules. It considers the factors that need to be considered in the vertical and horizontal grading of tasks but also points out that, for the time being, syllabus designers will have to draw on their experience and intuition as much as on research to make decisions about how to sequence tasks. An argument is presented for treating the structural component as a checklist rather than as a syllabus so as to allow teachers to address selectively those features that are found to be problematic for their students when they perform tasks

3D Multi-Cell Simulation of Tumor Growth and Angiogenesis

We present a 3D multi-cell simulation of a generic simplification of vascular tumor growth which can be easily extended and adapted to describe more specific vascular tumor types and host tissues. Initially, tumor cells proliferate as they take up the oxygen which the pre-existing vasculature supplies. The tumor grows exponentially. When the oxygen level drops below a threshold, the tumor cells become hypoxic and start secreting pro-angiogenic factors. At this stage, the tumor reaches a maximum diameter characteristic of an avascular tumor spheroid. The endothelial cells in the pre-existing vasculature respond to the pro-angiogenic factors both by chemotaxing towards higher concentrations of pro-angiogenic factors and by forming new blood vessels via angiogenesis. The tumor-induced vasculature increases the growth rate of the resulting vascularized solid tumor compared to an avascular tumor, allowing the tumor to grow beyond the spheroid in these linear-growth phases. First, in the linear-spherical phase of growth, the tumor remains spherical while its volume increases. Second, in the linear-cylindrical phase of growth the tumor elongates into a cylinder. Finally, in the linear-sheet phase of growth, tumor growth accelerates as the tumor changes from cylindrical to paddle-shaped. Substantial periods during which the tumor grows slowly or not at all separate the exponential from the linear-spherical and the linear-spherical from the linear-cylindrical growth phases. In contrast to other simulations in which avascular tumors remain spherical, our simulated avascular tumors form cylinders following the blood vessels, leading to a different distribution of hypoxic cells within the tumor. Our simulations cover time periods which are long enough to produce a range of biologically reasonable complex morphologies, allowing us to study how tumor-induced angiogenesis affects the growth rate, size and morphology of simulated tumors

An explicit algebraic closure for passive scalar-flux: Applications in channel flows at a wide range of reynolds numbers

In this paper, we propose an algebraic model for turbulent scalar-flux vector that stems from tensor representation theory. The resulting closure contains direct dependence on mean velocity gradients and quadratic products of the Reynolds stress tensor. Model coefficients are determined from Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) data of homogeneous shear flows subjected to arbitrary mean scalar gradient orientations, while a correction function was applied at one model coefficient based on a turbulent channel flow case. Model performance is evaluated in Poiseuille and Couette flows at several Reynolds numbers for Pr = 0.7, along with a case at a higher Prandtl number (Pr = 7.0) that typically occurs in water–boundary interaction applications. Overall, the proposed model provides promising results for wide near-wall interaction applications. To put the performance of the proposed model into context, we compare with Younis algebraic model, which is known to provide reasonable predictions for several engineering flows