Second Life may put Pharmacy students on fast track

Imagine you’re a Pharmacy student and it’s time to take your first-ever patient case history - in person, face to face. You’re in an unfamiliar building. You’re not sure what room you should be in, where the supplies are or where the patient is located. Now, in a calm and reassuring way, get that case history - and make it a good one. You’re graded on this.

This scenario plays out each year for fourth-year Pharmacy students. But thanks to work being done by ITS Teaching and Learning in Second Life, an immersive virtual environment, UNC-Chapel Hill Pharmacy students may be able to practice clinical care at a higher level on day one.

Second Life

Second Life is an online virtual world that users can access via any Internet connection. They create an avatar to represent themselves, then they move about a virtual world full of many everyday objects from their “first life,” such as public buildings, stores, schools and courtyards. Activities in the Second Life universe include conversations with people across the world, events (such as lectures), shopping and even classes. Learn more about Second Life by reading its Wikipedia entry.

Because schools can create (or recreate) their own institutions in Second Life, the virtual world provides a unique virtual environment for educators interested in increasing interactive learning, exploration, cooperative work, simulation, role-playing, new media studies and training. There are currently over 2.5 million subscribers to Second Life, including educators and students from such institutions as Harvard, MIT and Princeton.

Pharmacy case histories in a virtual world

Using their Second Life avatars, UNC-Chapel Hill Pharmacy students visit a virtual representation of Greensboro’s Moses Cone Family Practice Center. There, they learn the location of the exam room and waiting room and the layout of the building. They view video clips demonstrating a successful and effective patient interview.

Another pharmacy student, whose avatar has the role of patient, is given all the information they need to effectively play their role. The patient is invited into the exam room for a consultation with the pharmacy student who takes the case history. The interview is conducted with the voice chat feature of Second Life, allowing the students to talk to each other in real-time as if they were conducting a real interview at the Family Practice Center.

At the conclusion of the interview, the “patient” leaves the Exam Room, and the pharmacy student proceeds to a quiz station where he or she takes a quiz to assess the effectiveness of the information obtained during the case history interview. Once the review is completed, the results are e-mailed to the pharmacy instructor to assure him or her that the student has completed the module successfully.

The result: Accelerated and intuitive learning

Although this Second Life module has yet to be widely piloted, the few students who have experienced the case history Second Life experience found it intuitive and easy to maneuver, according to Dr. Peter Koval, assistant director for Pharmacy Research and Education Services at the UNC School of Pharmacy.

“I believe Second Life will allow students to accelerate their learning. Instead of taking five or six or even seven days of learning on-site to become oriented to their surroundings, because of their virtual experience, they may be ready on day one with a degree of comfort and familiarity with the location and the patient experience,” said Koval. “Second Life may allow students’ participation in patient care at a higher level and earlier in their clinical career.”

Plans are underway to pilot the Second Life patient case history module more widely in the School of Pharmacy in the fall.