Author: Kay Aitchison, kay.aitchison@ed.ac.uk
Author: Michael Begg, michael.begg@ed.ac.uk
Author: David Dewhurst, d.dewhurst@ed.ac.uk
Author: Susan Rhind, susan.rhind@ed.ac.uk
JISC e-Learning Activity Area: Technology-enhanced Learning Environments
Higher Education Academy Subject Centre: Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine
This case study illustrates...use of specialist software, an effect on learning, an effect on student personal development, student satisfaction with e-learning, innovation in learning and teaching, an influence on educational research, staff satisfaction with e-learning, a positive effect on recruitment, an influence on policy, use of resources, modifications to learning spaces, management of learning assets
Tangible Benefits
What tangible benefits did this e-learning approach produce?
Informal student and staff feedback has been extremely positive and confirms that the Virtual Farm offers a unique and engaging learning experience. Although formal discrete evaluation is not yet complete, the general impression, based on informal discussions with students and anecdotal feedback, is that students are now more aware of the activities and learning opportunities provided by the teaching farms and that having personalised relationships with subsets of herd data (through their adopted animals) allows this interest in the well-being of individual animals to scale up to a richer appreciation of herd/flock health and performance generally.
The principle is engaging and has led to several 'spin-off' projects investigating the embedding of real-time information and the use of web 2.0 technologies in other areas of the curriculum - e.g. the virtual veterinary practice and virtual post-mortem room. This suggests that the Virtual Farm can be viewed as a subportal within the VLE allowing selected content and resources to be surfaced in a new context - one that can be directly related to physical/ professional practice.
The core team involved in the project have, as a requirement of continued evolution of the virtual farm, become much more engaged with its ongoing development - in particular the next phase is making significant use of web 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs. This engagement with creating and integrating new content using innovative methods is viewed as positive in terms of staff development.
Students learn new skills particularly data handling and statistical skills but they have greater exposure, albeit in a virtual environment, to practices and procedures on working farms. The virtual sitting alongside opportunities for real-world experience on the farms will enable the program to manage increasing numbers of students. Although savings in terms of costs, time and resources are difficult to quantify, we consider that there are real benefits in terms of quality enhancement and optimisation of teaching resources. Certainly students, as evidenced through informal analysis of the blogs, are much more engaged with farm activities than they were previously.
As more teachers become aware of the data that is being gathered, it is possible to collect and archive this growing quantity of data and repurpose it for specific course related activities. For instance, there is, currently in development, a system for carrying out statistical analysis of specially contrived groups of animals which are derived directly from the virtual farm and used for specific teaching purposes. This effectively allows the virtual farm to become a real-time teaching and learning aid in lectures and tutorials.
Through the use of discussion boards (although to a much lesser degree the Virtual Farm blog also serves this purpose) the facility enables open discussions between students, teaching staff and farm workers (again, potentially!) provides good transparency of practice and promotes dialogue where previously there could be a great deal of isolation.
Did implementation of this e-learning approach have any disadvantages or drawbacks?
The Virtual Farm requires weekly input of information, news and data in order to keep it current and active. The current development of the animal husbandry wikis has required significant staff time but will provide a valuable teaching resource and help ensure long term sustainability and 'ownership' by staff involved in the day-to-day teaching and management of the relevant course. One of the most contentious issues has been the installation of webcams in work areas. Farm staff have concerns about being 'watched' while at work and there are also concerns about possible misinterpretation of incidents viewed. This has largely been resolved by careful siting of the webcams and although the concerns remain, to date there have been no issues raised.
There was an issue regarding the transfer of data from the farm management software to EEVeC which was caused by the format in which the software presents the animal data in and MS Excel spreadsheet. This has been resolved in the cattle software program by requesting the commercial company who supply that software to change its design. The sheep software program does require additional spreadsheet manipulation prior to transferring to EEVeC.
How did this e-learning approach accord with or differ from any relevant departmental and/or institutional strategies?
There is a strong history and culture of embracing e-learning within the Veterinary School and the Institution and funding for this initiative was obtained though a competitive bidding process for seedcorn money from a University-wide fund made available to support e-learning. This project was considered the most innovative of a number of projects ongoing in the Veterinary School at the time it was initiated and has been 'leading the way' in terms of web 2.0 implementation/embedding. The high profile nature of the project now within the Institution and the spin off/related projects illustrate that we are in a transition phase towards what we anticipate will be much wider use of similar technologies in other courses throughout the BVM&S programme.
