Advancing ophthalmic education research at the Save Sight Institute

Associate Professor Con Petsoglou and Dr Gloria Gomez are making strides in education research at SSI. Over the past year, they have co-presented their achievements at local conferences, sharing their findings with audiences around the globe.

Last 6 December 2021, they presented a paper at the inaugural Waranara Mini-Conference under the theme Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare Professions Education Research. FMH’s Waranara Network aims to undertake quality health professions education research that contributes to an evidence-based approach to improving our learning environments.

The paper, “OB3 media-rich documents with embedded discussions: lifting learning performance and engagement through interaction design,” was presented as part of the Technology Enhanced Learning stream at the conference and was very well-received.

Moving onto March this year, Assoc Prof Petsoglou and Dr Gomez collaborated with colleagues from the Ara Institute of Canterbury to present at the 16th International Technology, Education, and Development Conference (INTED22), which brought together participants from 75 different countries. Their paper, “Students and Teachers Co-designing Media-rich Document Resources in an Asynchronous Personal Learning Environment”, reported on collaborative assignments through which teachers and students become co-designers of educational resources. 

Finally, Dr Gomez was given a Special Commendation Award for her achievement and participation in Digital Health Week 2022. Held in February this year, Digital Health Week is a collaborative annual event hosted jointly by the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne.

Her poster, “Human-centred Design Studies and Explorations with Bridging Design Prototypes”, examined the Bridging Design Prototype approach which was developed to enable individual designers or small organisations with incomplete interdisciplinary teams to undertake sound human-centred design studies and explorations.

Students and early career academics have used this approach to develop fully functional rapid prototypes for gaining entry to real settings for learning about a user community. The poster introduced 14 case studies in educational, service, and health technology design.

With more to come over the next few months, including an invitation to present at Penn State University’s Digitally Engaged Learning Conference in September, the education team are working to build a body of research to evidence, support and improve ophthalmic education at SSI and beyond.