Breakout Rooms Serve as a Suitable Tool for Interprofessional Pre-Service Online Training among Students within Health, Social, and Education Study Programs

Abstract

Higher education institutions must prepare students from health, social, and teacher education programs for interprofessional collaboration (IPC) among children and young people with challenging childhood experiences. We wanted to explore if digital small group rooms, breakout rooms, are feasible for students to learn about, from, and with each other in an interprofessional learning (IPL) initiative, in order to practice IPC. This study is a repeated cross-sectional study from the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22 with 5412 respondents. The students worked in student-led IPL groups with a case-based learning approach and limited interaction with supervisors. The youngest students agreed to a larger extent that they learned more about, from, and with other students. The teacher students were more positive towards discussing sensitive issues in breakout rooms than the health students. The health students agreed to a larger extent than the teacher students that breakout rooms were suited for pre-service IPC training. The results from this study indicate that breakout rooms provide a potential arena to practice generic skills. If properly organized and structured, breakout rooms can be an excellent learning resource. Breakout rooms provide a safe online environment for learning and practicing IPC, and for training on talking about sensitive issues.

“It Enables Us to Reflect More on Nutrition”: A Mixed Methods Cross-Sectional Study on Preclinical Digital Training in Nurse Education

“…The same challenges as for in-person group work on campus were found for group work in breakout rooms, namely unprepared peers, peers showing up too late, peers not contributing to the group process and peers withdrawing after breakout room sessions had started. Some students may not able to dynamically participate in group work, for personal or technical reasons, whereas other students might dominate [17]. The percentage of students who did not prepare themselves before working together in the breakout rooms resembles the percentage who were previously observed from in-person interprofessional small groups of professional students [37,38].…”

“…When contrasted to face-to-face, in-person learning on campus, some challenges include discussions that tend to take longer, peers who may not turn on the camera or those peers who remain muted. Furthermore, students may feel uncomfortable because they might not see each other if the screen is shared or if the group size is large, and they may also get "Zoom fatigue" [16,17]. Frequent breaks, shorter sessions and use of student response systems (SRSs) have been suggested to combat fatigue and increase learning outcomes and satisfaction [16,18].…”

“…Tags can link to videos, maps, images, social media pages, websites and audio. The case-based small-group learning design was based on previous studies from OsloMet, both using small-group learning on campus [20] and in online breakout rooms [17]. Zoom breakout rooms: Scenario-based learning paths for the two fictive cases ("Leif" and "Sarah") after six months of clinical follow-up.…”

“…Drafts were discussed among colleges (academic and administrative) and accordingly revised. The questionnaire was based on earlier research using the "Nettskjema" anonymous, self-administrated web survey [28], prior research [17,20] and the pilot study (n = 24). Nettskjema is a tool for designing and conducting online surveys with customized features for research.…”

Transformation from Blended to Online Learning: A Four-Year Longitudinal Cross-Sectional Interprofessional Study

“…In the present study, data based on two pre-pandemic studies (delivered via blended learning) are merged with similar data from the 2020/21 and 2021/22 academic years, during which the IPL courses were delivered via well-planned online delivery on Zoom [63,64]. The IPL course in January 2020 was delivered nine weeks ahead of the pandemic lockdown in March, whereas the IPL course in January 2021 was delivered after nearly one year of pandemic lockdown measures, such as social distancing and stay-at-home rules [65,66].…”