Virtual patient (VP) simulations can offer educational benefits in healthcare disciplines by supplementing traditional training approaches and enabling the acquisition of clinically relevant skills and knowledge. Although the existing body of literature covers VP usage in healthcare professions such as medicine and nursing, there are no current…

Sonographers are medical or non-medical health professionals in the radiology field who skilfully manipulate ultrasound equipment to produce images that are used to diagnose medical conditions and abnormalities. This technique is also becoming popular amongst the wider community in other medical specialities and allied health professionals, due to…

Pressures in terms of the availability of quality, real-life clinical experiences for students have resulted in increased interest in the use of simulation in a variety of healthcare disciplines. "Te wahi whanau: The birth place" is a Virtual Birth Centre (VBC) that was created in "Second Life" in 2009 as part of the Second…

While the potentials of virtual worlds to support experiential learning in medical education are well documented, assessment of student learning within these environments is relatively scarce and often incongruent. In this article, a conceptual framework is proposed for formatively assessing dispositional behaviours in scenario-based learning…

Health professionals use critical thinking, a key problem solving skill, for clinical reasoning which is defined as the use of knowledge and reflective inquiry to diagnose a clinical problem. Teaching these skills in traditional settings with growing class sizes is challenging, and students increasingly expect learning that is flexible and…

In response to the challenges created by the implementation of a new medical school curriculum at the University of Otago in 2008, we aimed to develop a blended learning course for teaching rheumatology within the existing musculoskeletal course. We developed a multimedia online learning resource structured to support class based problem-based…

This paper presents the results of a descriptive longitudinal study which aimed to identify student paramedic perceptions of case based learning used in the clinical curriculum of the Bachelor of Emergency Health (BEH) degree at Monash University, Victoria, Australia. Case based learning and its integration within clinical curriculum is an…