Calling all e-learning folks who work in healthcare organizations

Feb 14, 2012

Jeanette Brooks
By Jeanette Brooks

Received a note from a blog reader who is looking for healthcare organizations to benchmark with. She's looking to broaden her organization's e-learning curriculum, and she wants to compare notes about what's working (and what's not) when it comes to developing & deploying e-learning in a hospital or healthcare organization.

What a cool opportunity to connect with someone in the same industry and help each other improve your organization's e-learning effectiveness!

If you work in a healthcare setting and would be willing to share your experiences with a fellow community member, please add a reply to this post, or send me a message (you can click on my name and choose "send private message"). Thanks!

159 Replies
Phil Ray
12 years ago02/23/12 at 9:50 am (UTC)

Hi there i know i'm more than a little late to the conversation. However i would like to offer my support and dare i say it expertise/experience.

I have now been working for a health and social care provider in the UK for the last 18 months. we have in excess of 150 homes and services covernig a large variety of services. One of my major tasks on joining was to revamp and standardise the learning for the organisation. A good team helps in a significant way. As part of the standardisation of traiing content i have sourced a moodle based LMS and have set a number of designers up with articulate and have spent some time up skilling them.

To make this happen getting the design structure right and assessing which delivery techniques are best for different topics has been critical. All solutions are blended which works really well with our audience. Feedback to date has been massivley positive and i would be happy to share further information if you would like to pick my brains

Phil

Jeanette Brooks
12 years ago02/23/12 at 2:16 pm (UTC)

Hey everyone! It's been so cool to see the enthusiastic response from all of you e-learning folks who work in healthcare! In fact, there's so much momentum here that many of you have inquired about having a monthly e-learning discussion thread that is specifically geared for course developers who work in hospitals or other healthcare settings.

So… check this out: 'Nita Venter and Doug Mattson have offered to coordinate a monthly forum discussion! They're both e-learning developers who (like all of you) build e-learning for health-related organizations. They’ll post a new question or topic each month - and in fact they posted the first one today! Head on over to this post and chime right in with your thoughts, ideas, resources, rebuttals, questions, anecdotes, jokes... or whatever other good stuff you'd like to share.

If you have suggestions for future topic-of-the-month ideas, just drop Doug or 'Nita a private message and let ‘em know. And by all means, if you know of other e-learning practitioners who work in the healthcare industry, feel free to invite them to the discussion.

Looking forward to all the continued idea-sharing!

Marlene Rhodenizer
12 years ago03/14/12 at 7:15 am (UTC)

Jeanette & others

I'm a novice at e-learning  and the  health care organization that I work for has  started doing some educational item in e-learning format, but really have no help for those of us outside the human resourse program. In our program we have just started to look at  an authoring tool. I'm leaning towards the Articulate product, as I feel that it was the most user friendly of those demo. I would love to have some advice from anyone willing to share.

Will Findlay
12 years ago03/23/12 at 10:20 am (UTC)

I'm the elearning instructional designer for Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, Missouri. This is a great idea to get everyone together!

A week ago I gave a presentation at the conference for the Children's Hospitals Association regarding a course we developed using Articulate and Quizmaker. If you are interested, here is a link to the description and to a PDF of the presentation. The PDF contains a link to the course itself as well for those who are extra curious:

Innovative Use of Education Technology for Ongoing Nursing Education

Meg Bertapelle
12 years ago03/27/12 at 11:39 am (UTC)

hi all, I can't remember if I already replied to this thread, but please include me in the group discussions as well!

I'm an Instructional Designer at Intuitive Surgical in Sunnyvale, CA.  Our company makes the da Vinci Surgical System - a robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgical system.  I typically create online training materials for our sales force and customers on a wide variety of topics.  It's fun! and demanding, but that's part of what makes it fun! :)

David Gutiérrez
12 years ago03/28/12 at 4:48 am (UTC)

Meg Bertapelle said:

 Our company makes the da Vinci Surgical System - a robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgical system.  I typically create online training materials for our sales force and customers on a wide variety of topics.  It's fun! and demanding, but that's part of what makes it fun!

Hi Meg! 

I'm currently working on a project (actually, it's just half of a proposal right now) involving MIS training through e-learning. I find it really challenging! Surgeons don't have much spare time, and contents must be extremely useful and add value to their expertise... You have my  admiration!

Meg Bertapelle
12 years ago03/28/12 at 8:41 am (UTC)

thanks David! I agree, salespeople as well have very limited time available (well, really, don't we all?).  I find Cat Moore's "Action Mapping" approach really helpful in culling out the extraneous information - if you haven't seen it, check out her blog & this post: http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2008/05/be-an-elearning-action-hero/

The more practice activities & real-life scenarios I can give them, the better so they can really see that the content will help them, the better!

David Gutiérrez
12 years ago03/28/12 at 10:56 am (UTC)

Well, I'm actually a big fan of Action Mapping, and everyday I struggle to use it for our courses, even though it's hard to convince people that not every piece of information is essential! My current challenge is implementing an accurate assesment, as in my experience transfer of knowledge to the job in healthcare is easy to see but not-so-easy to measure...

Meg Bertapelle
12 years ago03/28/12 at 11:15 am (UTC)

I TOTALLY hear ya David!  We have some "rubrics" or at least checklists to help us evaluate performance on real presentations - simulations of things that will be happening in the field.  Not that it's TOTALLY fail-safe, but it certainly helps!   The more specific and un-ambiguous you can make those, the better measurement you'll have, especially with multiple evaluators... that change every time... not to mention the instructor-leader changes every time... and many times the content... Ah the challenges of training

Michael Sutcliffe
12 years ago03/28/12 at 11:28 am (UTC)

Elizabeth Scully said:

Do any of you employ content experts who are also instructional designers? How do you create engaging courses in 30 days or less? I Has anyone developed a specific process for the "content experts" to follow when handing in course content?  Please share your process with me - I really look forward to reading all of your insights!  

Liz

Liz,

I work at a health system with about 3000 employees. Our education department has instructional designers who create content for live and online learning. We have a couple of people who are full-time eLearning developers, working on our EMR project. These people are experts in instructional design, and have worked for years in the Training & Development Industry. 

Our "content experts", on the other hand, work in the hospital and clinics. These are people such as Nurse Educators, division leaders, compliance people and other Subject Matter Experts. They have information they need to share, and they engage the Education department to turn that content into engaging learning.

It's similar to what Christine Stevens describes above. It can be fun, messy or both, depending on what the business goals are, how well-defined the instructional objectives are, how clear and relevant the content is, and lots of other factors. Wendy Garrison's observation is true here, too: most eLearning is just "page-turners" that are usually glorified PPTS, and nothing really engaging or creative.

Yes, we can easily create engaging eLearning in under 30 days... depending on the content, objectives, etc. The general 40-to-1 rule is accurate, in my experience -- it takes 40 hours of total development time to create 1 hour of an eLearning course.

I love Lynn Murphy's idea of creating a usergroup or network of Articulate users in Healthcare. Not sure how to do it, though...

Mohammad Hassam
12 years ago03/28/12 at 12:21 pm (UTC)

I am a bit late but, love to take this oppurtunity. I don't no how much feasible it is. But still, love to share my experience. I worked in DUBAL - Dubai Alumunium (One of the biggest company in DUBAI) as an Instructional Designer. Basically they are aluminium manufacturing company and approx. more than 4000 employees are working. DUBAL has it own Health care department where I was assigned to develop more than 200 courses for them on different topics.

I would love to involve in it.

Chris Kloek
12 years ago03/29/12 at 9:43 am (UTC)

I have been the eLearning developer for a health system of 2 hospitals and a number or outpatient services in Southern Oregon for the last 11 years.  I build compliance training and various tutorials.  I'd love to participate since I'm self-taught and always learning. 

Although we haven't done benchmarking, we have analyzed how long students remain in a course, how long on a page and how many times they have to take the quiz before they pass (as well as what questions are easiest and which cause difficulties).  It's been interesting and has contributed to the development of courses.

Chris Kloek
12 years ago03/29/12 at 11:53 am (UTC)

Yes, we use Articulate.  Our LMS gathers quite a bit of information including when a student enters and leaves a page.  From that we can calculate how long the student was in the module and how long they were on a page.  If we see a student on a page for 10 minutes, it’s usually a nurse who has left to attend to a patient.  We have to make some assumptions on those things.

Our LMS also tracks individual answers to quiz questions as well as keeping a record of each time the student takes the quiz.

Chris

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