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Sarah Elkins, Questionmark: This is Sarah Elkins from Questionmark, and today I’m talking with Lex Lucas, who is the online services manager at the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, which is a professional organization for rural and remote medicine, education, and training in Australia. Hi Lex, how are you today?
Lex Lucas, Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine: Hi Sarah, how are you?
Sarah: Good thanks. Now can you tell us a little more about the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine and your role there?
Lex: Sure. The Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine is a college for general practice in Australia. It’s one of two colleges, and basically it’s responsible for setting and arbitrating standards in rural, general practice. The college is in its eleventh year, and my job is the online services manager, so I look after a lot of the online work that the college does because Australia is such a big place, and in rural and remote medicine specifically, we’ve got people who are in some pretty remote areas, and so it’s pretty important to us to use technology to be able to assist us in communicating with our users. And so there’s a lot of different technologies that we use, and so that falls into my area of the college, I guess.
Sarah: Okay. And so like you just said, a lot of your students are in very isolated areas. Can you give us an idea of just how remote these places can be, and what sort of challenges this can create?
Lex: Sure. Just to give you an idea, I guess, is I’m, our head office is in Brisbane. If you jump in a car from Brisbane and drive for 24 hours north, you’d get to Cairns and you’d still be in the same state of Australia and you’d still be nowhere near the top. The same if you head west in a car twelve hours. You’d still be in the same state. And if you hop in a plane and fly six hours west, you’d get to Perth. You’d only get to the other side of Australia, so it’s a pretty big place. The majority of the population of Australia is scattered around the coast, and so that means that doctors who live in rural and remote communities are very isolated from any other sort of care, so if you live in a rural and remote community as a GP, you tend to practice what they often call cradle to grave medicine, where there aren’t any specialists around. If you want to send any one of your patients to a specialist, they might have to do a couple hours’ plane journey just to get to a specialist, so you need to be able to do emergency medicine. You need to be able to do some obstetrics and those sorts of things, and the only assistance might be the, might be the Royal Flying Doctor service, coming in from two hours away to pick up a patient, so if the patient gets sent to hospital, you’re probably the one to look after them, so there’s a lot of challenges for doctors living in those rural areas. And then on top of that, they tend to have isolation as far as some of their communications go. A lot of those doctors are now on broadband, but there are still quite a few areas that still only have dial-up connectivity, so yeah. So there’s a lot of professional isolation and technology isolation I guess to some extent too.
Sarah: Now you use virtual classrooms in your training. What do these typically involve?
Lex: Virtual classrooms I guess is just one of the tools that we, we use. Typically, we’ve got our own online platform that we’ve built that’s called RRMEO, which is RRMEO, which stands for Rural and Remote Medical Education Online, and we use that as a tool to allow our doctors to search for education that’s available, to record what they do, and also to engage in education, so it’s got its own content management system where people can engage in online education and some telemedicine services. And then more recently, we’ve started running some virtual classrooms through RRMEO as well, and those virtual classrooms are real time virtual classrooms that open up in a Java window and you can talk to each other online in real time through the internet. You can share images and point to things on the whiteboard. You can collaborate on documents. You can show a webcam. You can do online polling, and you can record the whole thing to play it back. And the technology that we’ve chosen actually works all the way down to dial-up connections, so it allows quite a bit of flexibility for how we can provide services to our members with those sorts of, with those sorts of tools.
Sarah: Great. And what type of surveys, tests, and exams do you run?
Lex: As far as our, as far as the assessments and tests that we run for our, for our members and particularly our registrars, who are medical registrars training towards a fellowship with our college, we try and run their, all of the assessments that we do with them, we try and run them within their communities, because for a rural doctor or a rural registrar in training to be able to come to a capital city to do an assessment, that might mean three or four or five days away from their practice. And so we try and find ways to do assessments where people don’t have to leave their practice. And so there are assessment things that they do locally with their supervisor. We also do some assessments via video conferencing, one on one, role play sort of scenarios. And then we also use Questionmark to run a three-hour-long, 125-question, high-stakes exam, that people need to pass to get through to fellowship amongst their other assessment processes.
Sarah: And why was it important for you to move to Questionmark Perception?
Lex: I guess the reason was that we wanted to run a reliable, secure, high-stakes exam that had, it had to be a defensible exam. We needed processes that we could create a bank of questions over time that we could, we would then know which questions had been used in previous exams. We could build up reports over time. We wanted to know that we could have an invigilator in each location to make sure that the person who said they were doing the exam was that person. We needed that invigilator to be able to log in. And we needed to be able to keep absolutely defensible records of all of these exam processes, because I guess in medicine we’re talking about, you know, people’s future careers. So we needed something that had the reliable reporting behind it, and Questionmark, when we looked around, seemed to be, seemed to be the only thing around that really, you know, fitted that criteria.
Sarah: And you recently started using Questionmark Live for authoring questions. How has this impacted your authoring process?
Lex: We’ve only quite recently started using Questionmark Live, and one of the problems that we had was, we wanted to go through a good, secure process of being able to create question items for our question bank, but with the complexity of trying to use Authoring Manager, it was really quite difficult to ask the subject matter experts to use that kind of software. And so, and we also needed some sort of workflow so that we could see what changes had happened in questions, and so really the only way to do that had been using things like track changes in Word documents and emailing them round, but of course our fear was that, you know, we didn’t have our questions secure enough. So we wanted to make sure we had a secure way of creating questions, editing questions, having a proper editorial process to come up with final questions to be put into the question bank, and so we’d been struggling for a while to find a good process to do that, and then of course Questionmark Live came along, and it seems to fit the bill. And about a month ago, we ran a conference in Melbourne in Australia where we had a roomful of subject matter experts, and over a two-day workshop they created almost 250 questions in Questionmark Live, and we’ve now got a series of editors going through an edit process on those questions, and when we’ve got the questions finalized, they’ll be then queue-picked out of there and put into our question bank, so we’re really in the middle of our first block of real use of Questionmark Live, and it seems to be going very well so far.
Sarah: Well that’s great. Thanks Lex. It’s been great talking to you today, and you’ve given us a great insight into your unique challenges, and how you’re using online assessment.
Lex: No problems. Thanks Sarah.
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