Using online roleplay in undergraduate midwifery education: A case-study
Section snippets
Background
Upon graduation midwives are expected to be skilled communicators, ready and able to collaborate with a range of other health professionals in order to deliver quality health care (e.g. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council (ANMC) 2006; Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) 2004). These skills include the ability to successfully negotiate with others, advocate for others (even if they hold an opinion which differs from their own), and to be able to clearly and succinctly argue a point of view
Method of evaluative data collection and findings
At the end of the final tutorial students were administered a paper-based survey. Twelve students took the time to complete the survey, a 63% response rate. The student survey was based on and adapted from the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) framework (Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), 2009). In particular the questions concerning skill development, active and collaborative learning and enriching educational experience are reported here as these bear a close
Skill development
There were four questions that provided students with the opportunity to respond as to how well they thought undertaking the roleplay enabled them to meet the learning objectives of the activity (as outlined above). Students responded with strong agreement to, possessing a better understanding (Questions (Q) 1&2 Table 3) concerning immunization. They indicated less strong agreement to the practice and knowledge application questions (Q. 3&4 Table 3). Only two students provided further comment
Active and collaborative learning
Questions regarding active and collaborative learning were aimed at determining the student's view on how well undertaking the roleplay facilitated collaboration and communication with each other. As Table 3 shows students were in strong broad agreement that the roleplay required them to use effective communication skills and assisted them to further develop their communication style (n = 11). They gave less positive responses to finding communication with other students easy (n = 8) and
Overall comment
Only two students made comments to the “other comments” question about their overall impressions of the value of the roleplay. These were:
Loved doing it!! and
Enjoyable spin on an interesting assignment, I think it worked quite well overall and we had no real issues at any point of the assignment.
Discussion
Fostering the development of communication skills for any health professional student is important, but can be difficult as currently there is no systematic approach to teaching such skills. For example, Aspergen conducted an extensive literature review of teaching and learning communication skills in medical education when 180 papers on the subject were reviewed and found that there are 10 commonly used measures of evaluating the effectiveness of communication skills learned (summarised in
Conclusions
Even though the number of students who responded to this survey was small their response was emphatic. They agreed that the online roleplay provided them with the opportunity to utilise effective communication and fostered development of negotiation and collaboration skills. It may therefore be concluded that students believe online roleplay provides a means to allow communication skills to be developed and practised.
Knowledge acquisition tied into the issues around infant immunization is also
Conflict of interest
None declared.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr Colleen Smith for her ongoing interest and support of the use of online roleplay in the School of Nursing and Midwifery UniSA. This midwifery roleplay arose out of a larger project which was funded by an UniSA Division of Health Sciences Teaching and Learning grant. We would also like to thank Ann Davenport (private consultant) and Dale Wache (UniSA) for their willingness to pass on their extensive knowledge of online roleplay design. Alison Hall and Caroline Jasper
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