How Access to Online Learning Resources as Part of a Blended Learning Approach in School Curriculums is Elevating Healthcare Students’ Skillsets and Experiences
SIMTICS offers online simulation in healthcare for schools to complement the current curriculum and see students’ potential soar.
The introduction of break-through online cognitive simulations into healthcare education is helping students to learn and retain skills, and improving their overall skillset and experience in the process. In today’s world, where teaching in a technology-rich and online environment is quickly becoming the norm, healthcare students are now experiencing the benefits of having access to online learning resources that are creating opportunities for faster and more comprehensive learning.
SIMTICS provides schools with a new layer of healthcare education tools to support, extend and enrich hands-on learning time. It is also ideal for students unable to regularly practice procedures in a real-life setting because of their location or a lack of available cases covering all the procedures to be learned.
Just like in the aviation world where simulations are an indispensable method for training students to fly, they’re now being utilized by healthcare students and teachers. SIMTICS CEO, Cherry Vanderbeke, attributes online simulation’s success to its ability to fill an educational gap. “I consistently hear feedback from teachers and past students that they wish a simulation in healthcare model had been available when they were learning. The main reason for this is that students need practice time, and the way they do that is in a clinical lab or at a site, on a mannequin, or on each other. But none of these resources are available every single moment a student needs them; they may not fit the student’s exact learning need, and they’re often limited by time and location,” says Cherry.
“When a school provides options for learning through online simulations, it means the students can practice at a cognitive level any time they like and wherever they are. Some students need more time than others because they may have a different learning style or personality, so may require more time and support. Online simulations also provide a non-judgmental self-paced environment, so the students can relax while they’re learning and testing their skills – and neuroscience tells us that stress and pressure stop people from learning. Furthermore, millennials don’t think of technology as an ‘extra’. They expect to be able to use it in all aspects of their lives, including while they’re learning.”
The kind of blended learning approach provided by SIMTICS also ensures that a student’s experience with different clinical scenarios isn’t limited by what type of patients walk in the door of the clinic. “Students may need to cement their skills in certain procedures, but there’s no guarantee that the right kind of cases will come into the clinical site when they need to practice those procedures,” Cherry says. “SIMTICS’s healthcare eLearning simulations offer opportunities to practice every skill online, including those that don’t present on clinical sites during the students’ externships.”
“Research suggests that once you have the basic procedural knowledge embedded in your brain, it frees your mind to focus on the higher order learning — or, in a clinical setting, on other things that may be going on in the room, like whether or not the patient’s condition has changed. We help students get the basic procedure right first.”
Each SIMTICS module covers one procedure in-depth. Students can watch (video), read (text), explore (anatomy), try (practice simulation), review (quiz) and test (test simulation and quiz).
To find out more about how SIMTICS is complementing educational programs with online simulation in healthcare, contact us here.
