In Health Education England’s (HEE) Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) programme, we want to make sure everything we do gives the best possible learning outcomes for the health and care workforce, so they can provide the best possible care for patients. The best way to do this is to speak to our learners and find out what technologies work for them and what technologies are best avoided.
In 2017, we commissioned learner research experts Towards Maturity to conduct a survey among NHS and social care staff. More than 1600 people took the time to contribute which provided some incredibly rich data on the possibilities of the needs of learners and the adoption of learning technologies. The findings also formed part of the evidence base and research for the development of the Learning Hub.
What we found is that staff generally like learning online, with 60% of staff indicating they would recommend online/digital learning to others in their organisation; 64% of staff use their own devices to access knowledge and information to help them learn; and 46% are motivated by technologies that enable them to network and learn with others.
The main motivations for learning were wanting to keep up Continuous Professional Development (90%), completing mandatory learning for compliance purposes (85%) and 65% reported wanting to be able to do their job faster and better.
However, there were barriers stopping staff from learning, with 52% citing a lack of time for self-study, 40% lacking somewhere appropriate to study and 40% complained about unreliable IT infrastructure, bandwidth or firewall problems.
You can read the full summary of the findings here:
As we reach the summer of 2019, we are ready to find out whether learner attitudes have changed as technologies have changed and learning technologies become more mature. Have the barriers to online learning been reduced? Will Virtual Reality transform the way we deliver education? How will Artificial Intelligence impact on the way education is personalised? We would like to invite you to take part in this year’s survey to capture a diverse sample of staff responses and give us a rich data set:
https://heeli2019.questionpro.eu/
The findings will be published later this year on the HEE TEL blog.
For more information about this piece of work please email tel@hee.nhs.uk.