Monthly Archives: June 2016

Medbiq xAPI workshop technical report

We just published the interim technical report from our xAPI workshop at the Medbiq annual conference. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304084961_Medbiq_xAPI_Workshop_2016_Technical_Report. (We also have an updated reported, stored internally here : Medbiq xAPI Workshop Report, which corrects a few minor errors in the original.)

Medbiq xAPI Arduino Sensors

As we mentioned in our earlier posts, we were really pleased by the participation at the workshop. We just heard from Medbiq that it was really well received and the evaluations were very positive.

We created this much more detailed Technical Report so that others, who may be interested in exploring what you can do with xAPI and Arduino sensors, can follow our processes and the challenges we faced. This will hopefully provide enough detail that others groups can also make similar explorations. Please feel free to contact us through this site if you are interesting in this area of research and development.

Turk Talk in action

Tomorrow, we will be testing out our Turk Talk function in OpenLabyrinth for the first time in a live teaching session. A number of nursing students at the University of Calgary will be putting it through its paces.

There have been some nice usability improvements since our early designs and it is now pretty easy to use. Michelle Cullen and her team at the School of Nursing have done a great job in debugging the cases. We are looking forwards to a fun session.

Testing this week has gone well and our facilitators even seem to have had fun! We hope the students do tomorrow as well.

WAVES: Widening Access to Virtual Educational Scenarios

The WAVES Project group had its first meeting in London over the past couple of days. More info will gradually be released on the project web site.

OpenLabyrinth will be extensively used in creating and supporting virtual scenarios for this project. And what the heck are virtual scenarios, I hear you ask? Scenarios in this context relate to the work of Ruth Colvin Clark in her book, Scenario-Based eLearning.

We have found this book to be very useful in our Scenario Based Learning Designs. Scenarios are basically groups of learning activities, put together so that you make best use of the resources available. We use the concept of Scenarios within OpenLabyrinth as a way to group together virtual patient cases (in a logically connected series if necessary), groups of learners, reports, counters, rules etc so that the Scenario Designer can take things way beyond a single simple case.

WAVES is coordinated by St George’s University, London, who are long time experts in OpenLabyrinth. This is a huge project involving health professional schools from many countries in Europe.

We are excited that the group is keen to explore the use of xAPI as a means of tracking activity metrics, and is also keen to work with Medbiquitous on forging common practices and Profiles around xAPI and Scenarios.