Poster accepted CCME/AFMC conference, May 2010
Our group's poster has been accepted for presentation at  the 2010 Canadian Conference on Medical Education (St. John’s,NL) May 1-5, 2010

Rich Environments for Active Interprofessional Learning: Learning Together with Cases
Provincial and federal initiatives are promoting Interprofessional education (IPE) for health professionals, however, few institutions have access to standard, evidence-linked, IPE curricular content (CIHR, 2008). The ‘Rich Environments for Learning' (REAL) project uses technology to simulates Interprofessional practice while providing an opportunity to facilitate the development of core Interprofessional competencies in pre-licensure health professional students. The goal of the project is to design, develop, implement and assess a technology-facilitated learning experience designed to prepare health professional students for functional collaborative practice situations. We have developed a series of authentic web-based patient stories that are adaptable to a variety of educational contexts and settings. Prelicensure students from Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, Nursing, Medicine work to explore cases, develop common resources and complete related tasks using both interactive web-based collaborative tools as well as face-to-face sessions. The patient stories that we have developed are multi-layered enabling students to learn both discipline-specific content as well as common IP competencies. An ‘Educational Management Action Research' approach (McPherson and Nunes, 2004) has been used to evaluate the implementation of the project, with particular focus on authenticity and usability of the cases and web-interfaces as well as planned adoption by educational leaders.