This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a mobile device healthcare simulation design that engages students in an active learning, pre-class activity. Pre-class assignments are documented to improve student learning but traditional reading meets with poor student compliance. The increasing prevalence of student-owned tablets/smartphones creates a platform to satisfy a demand for engaging, scientifically accurate, mobile simulations distributed as pre-class activities. In Phase I, a tablet/smartphone mobile simulation prototype will be developed to simulate a commercially available, electronic fetal monitor used to teach perinatal monitoring. The Phase I mobile simulation will be derived from previously developed simulation technology documented to improve learning. The Phase I experiment will compare learning outcomes among nursing students using the pre-class mobile simulation with those exposed to traditional reading or no pre-class activity. A randomized, controlled experiment will be conducted in a college of nursing to assess learning. Access to the pre-class mobile simulation is expected to result in improved learning outcomes compared with traditional techniques. The Phase II effort should extend the accessibility and marketability of the concept by developing mobile simulations for allied disciplines and validating that enhanced learning outcomes occur among diverse topics and student populations.
The broader/commercial impact of this SBIR Phase I project is the development, production, and marketing of engaging and scientifically accurate, mobile device simulations that are designed to help students in the health sciences learn difficult medical physiology concepts. Pre-class reading assignments and quizzes can improve student learning, free up class time for active learning activities, and enable instructors to customize their presentations according to student need. Unfortunately, poor student compliance with pre-class reading and the increased faculty time needed to review student assignments prior to a scheduled lecture have combined to limit the use and benefits of pre-class learning. The proposed mobile simulation technology delivers a dynamic and engaging, clinically-focused, pre-class activity combined with a learning analytics method that helps to quantify student knowledge. This technology will be marketed as Android, iOS and Windows smartphone/tablet applications. Because the mobile simulation can be easily adapted to any concept in the biosciences, a successful SBIR effort in obstetrical nursing can be scaled-up to a library of applications in a variety of health related bioscience disciplines including physiology courses in colleges and universities, topic specific course content in colleges of nursing, medicine, and respiratory care, and in general undergraduate and high school biosciences courses.
The US health care system requires increasing numbers of highly trained practitioners to meet the increased demand of an aging yet active baby boomer population having greater access to health care through the Affordable Care Act. Training health care students and recertifying health care professionals in the face of ever increasing amounts of information and declining educational budgets is an expensive and time consuming reality faced by today’s health care educators. A solution to this challenge lies in previously conducted educational research where it has been convincingly demonstrated that pre-class activities introducing new material can increase student performance compared with traditional teaching methods. The combination of pre-class exercises with active learning in a traditional classroom is a proven educational strategy known as Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT). Developed for physics education with support from the National Science Foundation in the 1990’s, JiTT requires students to read and complete carefully constructed exercises, covering material that has not yet been presented, and submit them prior to class. Instructors subsequently review students’ pre-class responses and use the responses to tailor the upcoming classroom session to student needs, hence the Just-in-Time label. The WholeLogic® SimLet is a modern implementation of the JiTT strategy; an innovative instructional technology that delivers a measured quantity of critical core material to a students’ tablet or smartphone while storing student responses and treatment choices for instructor review. Results of the SBIR Phase I experiment convincingly demonstrate a 15% increase in learning outcomes among nursing students using this technology. In addition to improving student comprehension, SimLet technology has the potential to decrease in-hospital training costs. Conversations with hospital education departments have revealed that use of SimLet technology could result in an 83% cost savings in training and annual recertification of hospital staff. The Phase II effort will extend development and testing to in-hospital training programs and to the health care specialty of respiratory care enabling WholeLogic to successfully market this technology in collaboration with our strategic partners. The innovation has the potential to be successful in any life science discipline where waveform recognition and interpretation is important. Accordingly, we plan to develop and market SimLet technology for use within the very large commercial markets of baccalaureate and high school general biology instruction where the educational and economic impacts of the innovation will be extensive.
