Designing virtual worlds for effective peer feedback

The case of Otago Virtual Hospital

Abstract

Despite the importance and reliability of peer feedback, medical students currently have few formal opportunities to give and receive peer feedback on their clinical practice. To provide medical students with such opportunities, a multi-user virtual hospital was developed. In the Otago Virtual Hospital, medical students role-play as junior doctors and manage realistic clinical cases within the Emergency Department. To encourage effective peer feedback, the instructional design of the virtual world needs to follow sound pedagogical principles. In this paper, we describe five of these principles and how the Otago Virtual Hospital has been redesigned to fulfill them. These redesign practices can serve to guide educators and instructional designers interested in implementing scalable and effective peer feedback on student performance.