Professor Gaynor Sadlo, head of occupational therapy in the School of Health Professions, has been awarded a national grant from the Higher Education Academy to enhance students' experience of learning.
Through staff development and action-research, the project will enable staff teams across the school's three professions (occupational therapy, physiotherapy and podiatry) to work together to redesign and digitalise their problem based learning (PBL) cases using newly available software. They will build multimedia presentations of real world situations to enrich student engagement with the persons featured and to better capture problems' authenticity.
The software offers many opportunities to simulate critical reasoning through unfolding stories, questions, self-directed quizzes and other techniques. The system also lends itself to online, interprofessional and international learning.
Professor Sadlo pioneered problem based learning in the UK, and writes and consults in the PBL field, including PBL for work-based learning, using real current workplace issues. Professor Sadlo will be working closely with module leaders and students who are vital members of the project, helping to ascertain what works from their perspective. The project marries perfectly with the university's new strategic plans for developing more online flexible modes of learning, and runs until April 2014.
