Barbara Truman

Virtual TeamSTEPPS® Simulations Produce Teamwork Attitude Changes Among Health Professions Students

BACKGROUND The majority of the estimated 400,000 or more patient deaths per year in the United States are from preventable medical errors due to poor communication. Team training programs have been established to teach teamwork skills to health professions students. However, it is often challenging to provide this training at a physical site. A brief intervention using a virtual learning environment with TeamSTEPPS(®)-based scenarios is described. METHOD Using a pretest-posttest design, the effects on teamwork attitudes in 109 health professional students from two institutions and multiple disciplines were measured using the TeamSTEPPS Teamwork Attitudes questionnaire. RESULTS Participants showed significant attitude changes in the categories of leadership, situation monitoring, mutual support, and communication (p ⩽ .05), with significance in four of the six indicator attitudes in the communication section at the p ⩽ .001 level. CONCLUSION These findings indicate the potential impact that virtual learning experiences may have on teamwork attitudes in learners across professions on multiple campuses.

TeamSTEPPS Virtual Teams: Interactive Virtual Team Training and Practice for Health Professional Learners

Medical errors because of communication failure are common in health care settings. Teamwork training, such as Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS), improves team performance and patient outcomes. Academic institutions seek high-quality, low-cost curricula for interprofessional education (IPE) to prepare learners for clinical experiences before and after graduation; however, most IPE curricula involve lectures, simple tabletop exercises, and in-person simulations and are not readily accessible to geographically distributed and asynchronously engaged learners. To address this need, interprofessional faculty from multiple institutions and specialties created a series of eight screen-based interactive virtual simulation cases featuring typical clinical situations, with the goal of preparing learners to provide safe and effective care in clinical teams. Virtual simulations permit flexible, asynchronous learning on the learner’s schedule and allow educators an opportunity to identify gaps in knowledge and/or attitudes that can be addressed during class or forum discussions. In 2016, 1,128 unique users accessed the scenarios. As a result of such virtual activities, learner selection of the appropriate TeamSTEPPS tool increased with progression through the scenarios.

Advancing Interagency Collaboration Through Constructive Simulation: Results from the 2015 Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds Workshop

Immersive, 3D conferences are becoming viable using OpenSimulator, open source software. The act of planning for an immersive conference using the software dependent on the conference success strengthens the community of users that participate in the platform. This paper describes three conference events held from 2013–2015 involving an emerging consortium of leading developers and researchers of virtual worlds. The implications of technological success of immersive conferences hold promise for government and military agencies facing training requirements under fiscal restrictions. A workshop was conducted during the writing of this paper establishing the inaugural, immersive workshop for the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds sponsored by the US Army and Avacon Incorporated, a non-profit organization producing conference events.

Values-Based Network Leadership in an Interconnected World

This paper describes values-based network leadership conceptually aligned to systems science, principles of networks, moral and ethical development, and connectivism. Valuesbased network leadership places importance on a leaders repertoire of skills for stewarding a culture of purpose and calling among distributed teams in a globally interconnected world. Values-based network leadership is applicable for any leader needing to align interdependent effort by networks of teams operating across virtual and physical environments to achieve a collective purpose. An open-learning ecosystem is also described to help leaders address the development of strengths associated with building trust and relationships across networks of teams, aligned under a higher purpose and calling, possessing moral fiber, resilient in the face of complexity, reflectively competent to adapt as interconnected efforts evolve and change within multicultural environments, and able to figure out new ways to do something never done before. ANDREW G. STRICKER, PHD

Exploring individual differences as factors to maximize interactive learning environments for future learning

ABSTRACT Identifying characteristics of individuals who will be negatively impacted by interactive learning environments (ILE) was explored in a field study conducted among learners whose high-stakes performance depended upon grasping training scenarios quickly. Gauging the appropriateness of computer-based simulations for individuals became a pedagogical theme, and examining whether the history of technology usage was a factor revealed what may negatively impact an individual’s stress and workload and therefore hinder learning. This study found that individuals reporting higher frequency of computer usage experienced more temporal demand, and reported higher virtual world usage predicted a decrease in temporal demand. Implications suggest continual development of digital literacy skills to prepare for using ILEs especially for faculty and instructors. Establishment of consistent nomenclature of virtual technology terms will improve reliability and validity of measures. Areas of future research include inquiry into digital leadership for promoting metacognition and self-efficacy.