Using drama to make learning more engaging

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In our discussions we have talked about how to make online more engaging for learners, particularly when they are not in physical proximity. The choices we have of learning and teaching methodologies are limited in some ways, although enhanced in others.

When we designed our first two Massive Open Online Courses here in the School of Health & Social Care - 'What matters: understanding mental health', and 'Deteriorating patient: assessment, recognition and management' - we decided to use drama to illustrate the journey of a patient from home to care scenarios and back to home again.  We employed a professional script writer, actors and camera crew to shoot two six-part dramas, with the story line deliberately 'cliff-hanging' at the end of each episode to encourage course participants to want more. Some of the filming was done on campus in our 'clinical skills laboratories', some was off site in a bar, a shop, a flat and on a railway bridge!

Using drama like this massively increases the cost of building a MOOC, and we were only able to do this because we were commissioned to build these courses for the National Health Service here in the UK. I thought you might be interested in seeing trailers for the two films. These only show a brief view of the overall films, but should give you a flavour of their content. We then built the learning and teaching material around these episodes to create the course itself. We did shoot other film to augment the dramas, mostly to show how assessment should take place.

Journey 

This video is the trailer of the short film "Journey", which we use in What Matters: Understanding Mental Health. The storyline follows Carol Price and her journey to recovery from a mental illness. It allows us to explore all sorts of stigma and myth. For example, most participants feel that she has dementia from the early clips, which might be because of her age?

Second Chance 

This video is the trailer of the short film "Second Chance", which we use in Deteriorating Patient: Assessment, Management and Recognition. This follows a clinical episode for Gary, who has a perforated ulcer needing emergency surgery. Unluckily for him he gets a post-operative sepsis, and then even more unluckily he is allergic to the antibiotics given to treat the infection! We pack a lot into one drama :-)

let me know if you would like more information about the films we created. You can find all six episodes on our other MOOCs :-)