Clinical placements allow students to enhance their learning and enable them to develop appropriate professional skills and attitudes. Similarly, students reflections obtained about clinical placements can help teachers and other faculty staff i) to understand the gaps between academia and industry; ii) as tools to explore alternative ways of thinking, and iii) as prompts to improve their own skills and future learning materials. Currently it is the norm for such reflections to be either handwritten or submitted electronically through email or online portals. All current ways of submitting reflections to faculty serve mainly for acquiring knowledge, however teachers and faculty may still miss the insights and relevant topics within reflections and thus miss opportunities to improve their future teaching strategy in that field. So, is there any new way to replace, amplify and transform the current ways of handling reflections obtained from students who have recently been in placement?

This is one consideration we were seeking to answer through SLIPPS (Shared learning practice to improve patient safety) project. SLIPPS project incorporates a Human Centric Design (HCD) [1] approach to develop the novel Learning Event Recording Tool (LERT)and improve the user experience by having interaction with all the stakeholders i.e. designers, researchers, students and teachers from the early stage of development. The LERT could replace, amplify and transform existing ways of handling (i.e. “analyzing”, “updating”, “managing “and “archiving”) data produced from reflections and open up new “Big data analytic” opportunities to address numerous questions.

Further, the potential for such a tool to lead to better results across many scenarios, for example, the tool can take a batch of placement reports submitted by the students; these can be searched against the existing keywords and any matches highlighted. Such practices will reduce the time required previously to filter repeated keywords and at the same time give opportunities to identify new keywords and store them for future use. Teachers may also share meaningful learning events (anonymized) on our SLIPPS learning portal.

[1] Ritter, F.E., Baxter, G.D., and Churchill, E.F. Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems. Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems, (2014), 33–54.