Our Story
March 2020
In March 2020 the UK went into its first lockdown in response to the COVID pandemic. Immediately all the educational activity was halted in order to control the spread of the virus. This had a massive impact on the tens of thousands of doctors in training for whom teaching programmes were not only a necessity but mandated.
Mr U Ahmed (UA) was, at that time, a Training Programme Director (TPD) for Core Surgical Training (CST) in the West Midlands. His key role was to develop and deliver the regional teaching programme for CST.
The West Midlands is a huge geographical area (approximately 4500 sq miles) with more than 20 hospitals catering for 120 surgical trainees. And at the time the teaching programme took place on a monthly basis at regional hospitals. But this was now out of the question. We needed a solution.
At this point video conferencing platforms were on the rise, but more than anything we needed some sort of goverance process in order to log attendance, share resources and deliver teaching.
The Surgical Virtual LEarning Environment (sVLE)
UA explored options and started trialling a Moodle platform. The first incarnation was initially launched for 120 CST doctors in order to facilitate UA in delivering regional teaching. However, the verstaility of the platform meant that it very rapidly expanded to deliver teaching capabilities for the entire School of Surgery (SoS) in the West Midlands - that's 500 trainees!
With the virtual environment in place we wanted to ensure that we used it maximally. We opted to bring entire programmes on with encouragement for them to utilise the platform as they needed and with that the Digital Teaching Fellowship (DTF) was born.
The aim was for enthusiastic trainees to become the link between their teaching programmes and the SVLE and build whatever they needed online that would support their own and their peers learning.
The heterogeneity within the groups included not only the size and spread of the groups but also the long established culture within their programmes. Some of them had requirements for weekly teaching with multiple online classrooms, others would get together once a month for a teaching day. Being able to offer this allowed to onboard most of the surgical programmes rapidly with one to three fellows per programme
School of Medicine
We took our learning from the first 3 months and then offered a welcoming hand to other schools and the WM School of Medicine came on board. The potential volume of users meant that the platform needed to be upgraded and rebranded. We increased our capacity to 3000 users and rebranded to the Postgraduate Virtual Learning Environment (PGVLE) to acknowledge the diversity of the user groups
Expansion
Expansion continued with the Schools of Pathology, Psychiatry, Emergency Medicine and O&G and engagement was variable but positive. The organic growth model has allowed us empower groups of trainees to take the lead in their DTF roles and make it their own. The variety of outputs have been phenomenal.
By December 2020 we were rapidly approaching out 3000 user limit so expanded the platform to 5000 which saw us through to July 2021
The Big Blue Button
Just a word about the Big Blue Button. This platform is open source web conferencing with a dedicated classroom vibe. It is designed primarily for teaching and in our view (when used correctly) has greater quality than some of the other platforms available. It is currently integrated into the PGVLE.
Summer 2021
The platform continued to expand and capacity was once again increased to cater for up to 10000 and we saw interest from not only the remaining schools in region but also from groups outside of the Midlands. The PGVLE project was truly embedding itself into the framework of the Midlands
One year on
We reviewed the fact that we had delivered a full year worth of training completely online. And in our evaluation the merits of the platform far exceeded any challenges. The PGVLE was firmly in place. At this point we had appointed a dedicated out of programme fellow to continue to enhance the platform. Despite being Digital Teaching Fellows previously, Mr Alex Crichton and Mr Tahir Khaleeq joined the team
Aspire
We fielded a request from the Vascular Society of Great Britain and Ireland to support delivery of the Aspire 7 and Aspire 8 course. In doing so we were able to host one of the largest FRCS courses the society had ever delivered and achieved our first peer-reviewed publication.
Changing Landscape
The realisation of the extent of COVIDs impact on training continues to be realised and as such from Autumn 2021 the PGVLE took on a consolidatory position in order to strengthen governance and process whilst also continuing our organic expansion.
We highlighted three key delivery areas for the PGVLE and these were to be provided as individual features or in combination based on what our users needed
Summer 2022
The platform needed further expansion as we approach our 10000 user limit so was extended to 15000. But now we were getting national level engagement. In addition to all pre-exisiting groups online, we were now supporting the national core surgical training programme