Otago Virtual Hospital

Medical students learning to notice clinically salient features

Abstract

Part of learning to become a doctor involves learning to read or notice the world as a medical professional. Such identity formation can take place by participating in social practices within virtual worlds. In this paper, we report early findings from a case study of seven medical students performing the role of junior doctors in the Otago Virtual Hospital (OVH), focussing on the degree to which they noticed and recorded the salient features in a clinical case. Using video recordings of in-world activity, submitted patient notes, and audio recordings of pre- and post-interviews, we provide early evidence that solving an open-ended case in OVH has the potential to require students to notice, record, and integrate significant elements of the case by themselves. One of the aims of our descriptive study is to isolate variables that can eventually be used to study the nature of learning in virtual worlds with greater precision.