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At Nova Southeastern University College of Osteopathic Medicine (NSU-COM), members of the Department of Medical Education built the Virtual Clinic and Art Observation center in Second Life (SL). The goal of this innovative creation is to provide an instructional tool, whereby medical students can perform realistic and continuous virtual encounters with patients, while reinforcing didactic and clinical skills experiences inter-professionally.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have bolstered and fast tracked distance education and e-learning. The advancement in ICT infrastructure is making distance education increasingly effective and creates a new learning environment that promises to advance e- learning opportunities. Second Life (SL) virtual world is a popular tool that enhances socialization and social presence in distance learning by giving students and instructors novel ways to interact, collaborate, and engage. It simulates real-life settings and increases internet skills beyond the gaming aspect. Its unique features as an Immersive Learning Environment (ILE) and a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) focus on new pedagogical methodology that has the potential to improve social communication, teamwork, understanding of global issues, events, data visualization, simulations, and education. These exclusive features of SL lend themselves to great use in medical education.The development of NSU-COM’s Virtual Clinic and Art Observation center in SL took careful planning and procedure. Students and faculty were the major stakeholders in the design and development of the 3-D tool. SL involves integration of highly complex 3-D modeling tools with strong scripting of programming language to ensure proper efficacy. Development in SL for educational purposes involves huge amounts of creativity, imagination, knowledge of the subject matter, and time.
The first scenario created in SL assesses the ability of second year medical students to ask the correct open-ended questions during virtual encounters with patients in the SL virtual world, thereby simulating real-life experiences. Student doctors create their individual avatars and fly in-world for virtual patient encounters. Once arriving at the virtual clinic, the student doctor is presented with a brief orientation and then proceeds to the clinic room. As the student walks into the room, the virtual patient presents with certain medical conditions. Then the student interacts with the virtual patient, asking the correct open-ended questions. Once the questions are asked, the student immediately gets feedback that evaluates the exchange, explaining which questions were correct and which were wrong. The process of feedback and debriefing usually completes the simulated experience.The second development project in SL is the Virtual Art Observation center. This virtual art gallery uses artwork from the Nova Southeastern Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale for the Art, Medicine and Observation course.
The goal of the course is to provide third and fourth-year medical students a flexible instructional medium where they use skills learned from their art, medicine, and observation in a fun way that increases their clinical skills. Students can teleport to the virtual clinic and diagnose patients any time, from any place. The scenarios presented to the student doctors involve virtual patients who present with conditions for diagnosis and encourage the students to adopt their knowledge of art principles such as line, color, balance, and symmetry from the art observation session.
The technology of Second life (SL) virtual world represents a major advancement in medical education. SL fosters visualization of global research work and meetings, where experts would meet in-world to discuss their collaborative work and simulate their innovative ideas in a risk- free environment, while simulating real-life experiences. In creating this education tool, NSU- COM continues to be on the cutting edge of curriculum development for future physicians.
