“Have you already had previous experience in this field?”, “Do you have the practical skills necessary for this job?”

Many young graduates hear these types of questions daily, during  job interviews, and find it difficult to get a position because of their lack of experience in the field.

A significant number of them do not have practical experience during their studies and consequently struggle once they have to face the reality of the workplace. Sometimes, especially during internships, too much is expected and demanded of students and this can put their reliability and safety at risk.

This can be a serious problem in all kinds of work sectors but particularly in the sector of medicine and healthcare, where novice trainees can encounter real struggles if they have barely had any practical experiences during their studies.

That is why Scenario-Based Learning (SBL) is being used to improve the students’ understanding of the working world. SBL can be an important asset for learners as they can experience problem-based learning and compensate for the lack of practice.

However, opinions on SBL still divide the teaching communities. While some educators find it an efficient tool for learning, others are still sceptical and struggle to fit it in traditional learning platforms.

That is where WAVES comes in! With the aim of promoting and making virtual scenarios more accessible to a wide range of professions, WAVES marks a turning point in the educational sector.

“WAVES” OF CHANGE

“WAVES – Widening access to virtual educational scenarios”, is a Knowledge Alliances project funded by the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Union. The alliance is composed of Higher Education Medical Institutions and businesses from the United Kingdom, Greece, Germany, Sweden and Czech Republic. Associate partners,  from all over the world also make up their network.

To meet its goals, the partners created two toolkits with different purposes. The first one is the Knowledge toolkit whose aim is to promote virtual scenario creation and use to educators. The second is the Technical toolkit that supports educators with a wide range of basic technical tools that enable the creation of virtual scenarios even without having specific technical skills.

One of the most brilliant outcomes of the project was the launching of an online course (MOOC) on how to use virtual scenarios to enhance effective learning. With over 8000 people enrolled, the course is having  widespread success and receiving very positive feedback in the teaching community. It is accessible on FutureLearn (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/virtual-scenario).

Thanks to its stunning developments and results, WAVES is definitely a successful story of how, by putting together brilliant minds from all over Europe, it is possible to contribute to making a real change in the Higher Education sector.

With its wide community, WAVES has the right credentials to continue to improve the Higher Education sector and make scenario-based learning popular and accessible, with the ambition to see it employed by teachers and learners in Europe and beyond.

Read the full story here.