Continuing Professional Development office is leaping into the future

On Wednesday, 7 June, Education Services and McMaster Education Research, Innovation & Theory Program (MERIT) within the Faculty of Health Science awarded $25,000 to our team led by Drs. Ilana Bayer and Teresa Chan through the Education Scholarship Fund. Our project focuses on advancing the learner’s experience by building a virtual emergency department (ED) in the Metaverse for hands-on training. 

The Metaverse is a 3D quasi-immersive virtual space where people experience life in ways they couldn’t in the physical world using avatars and video for proximity chat. The Metaverse itself is computer generated and can therefore become any space imaginable – including an ED.  

The purpose of the project is to create a metaverse-version of an ED where learners can simulate the care of multiple patients and interact hospital systems.  

Bayer is the Director of the Learning Technologies Lab (LTL) and Chan, Associate Dean of Continuing Professional Development (CPD), are leading the project. 

“This is an opportunity to develop active and flexible learning spaces where our trainees and clinicians can interact in a way that may not be possible in the physical environment,“ Bayer says. 

“We are in a very interesting time where the technology is definitely going faster than we can handle in education. It’s up to us as education scholars to try to test some of these things out and design them in a way that makes sense for both learners and teachers alike,” Chan says. 

“This is an exciting project where we are using a design-based research approach that elicits trainees’ and clinicians’ involvement in the design of the metaverse ED and patient scenarios. This will be followed by an evaluation of the learners and their experience in the simulations,” Bayer says. 

The news of the approved funding proposal broke on the heels of our department winning the Hal Jayne Excellence in Education Award for Chan’s work in emergency medicine education.  

The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) recognized her profound contributions to emergency medicine pedagogy, equipping countless medical professionals with the necessary skills and knowledge to deliver exceptional patient care.  

“As one of the first Canadians to win an award from SAEM, it has been a privilege to work with the organization to invest in and support clinician educators,” Chan says.