My name is Carol Grech and I am the Head of
School of Nursing and Midwifery at University of
South Australia. Our school has had a lot
long history of flexible delivery
of all our programs both Undergraduate
and Post Graduate and our courses
are all delivered through the Learn Online
platform. Learn Online has
been central for us for the high quality
delivery of all our courses
that are underpinned by inquiry based learning
as the pedagogy that drives student learning
in our school. The school has embarked on the
development of a virtual community called the
City of Horizon. The concept of virtual
community fits really well within a flip
classroom approach. Nursing, like
medicine has been taught in very traditional
ways over many years. So students would
often start their program learning about anatomy
in physiology and certain
nursing procedures and then apply that learning
to a person with a particular illness
or disease state. However nursing is not
only about having scientific knowledge to
inform clinical decision making.
Compassionate care is a fundamental component of
nursing and therefore
in the program that we have developed
students start by getting to know a range of people
and families who live in the
community of the City of Horizon.
Horizon is a fictitious community
that is representative of a South Australia
regional centre with a population of around
30,000 residents. The population
demographic actually
represents multiple social and
culturally diverse people as well as
people from across the age spectrum
It is also illustrative
of the Australian Health Care System
and has a full component of health
care facilities and they are all centred
around the University of South Australia
Health Service. The online virtual community provides
the students with a central access point
to the information required to drive and progress
their learning. Currently we have a call
group of 12 virtual patients and students
visit the community and visit those patients
and they learn about them as people,
their family, their friends, their workplace
and their social network. The theory
components of the nursing program are then
scaffolded around the community, people
who live there, which creates a far more
authentic opportunity for the students
because it emulates people in real life
and not just in a standardized
patient approach where they would only care for that person
in their illness within a hospital or health
service. In building our
community we have been working with the Royal Flying Doctor
service and Womens and Childrens so that we can
be assured that the case
studies that we are developing are authentic
and they are also working with us
to give us additional resources so again
it is building up a whole suite
of interesting and relevant case studies.
Essentially the online virtual
community Horizon offers a
limitless foundational structure to promote
engagement and immersion for students across
multiple blended learning platforms.