Thank you BAPRAS Council members!!!

I am really delighted to announce that BAPRAS Council has agreed to fund the e-LPRAS project through to completion.  I attended their meeting last week and made a presentation to support the Business Plan that I submitted for their consideration. This is a really generous offer and represents a major financial contribution by our professional association. I am very grateful to all the Council members for their support.

This means that we will be able to recruit  one more full time Instructional Designer from January 2012 to work alongside Stephen Gibbons, who becomes Lead Instructional Designer. He will spend some of his time supervising the work of the new ID  but will continue to work on sessions himself. I will also increase to 1.5 days per week (in reality one day and two days on alternating weeks). We aim to complete the project by the end of 2017.

BAPRAS  members will be asked to consider a motion at the AGM in December to increase the rate of funding (although the final cost remains unchanged) to allow completion by end of 2015. This will be a big financial commitment and Council felt (very appropriately in my opinion) that there should be wider discussion among members before this was agreed.

Once I have caught up with all those jobs I had to put off while I wrote the Business Plan, I will be sending out new topics for which we will need authors. If you have not written anything yet but would like to do so, please get in touch. We are looking for an international faculty to help us to produce an international learning resource, so please get in touch to discuss how you can help. We provide full support for authors, many of whom have never written for e-learning before. I can assure you that it is easy to learn (after all I did!!!)

Of course, this can only happen because we have a wonderful bunch of content authors already and my heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone who has supported the project to date. I look forward to working with all of you in the future.

Progress with Module 1

Work continues on writing sessions for Module One while we await the decision of BAPRAS Council with regard to future funding. I'm delighted to report that all of the sessions for the first module have been allocated to authors and more than half have now been returned for editing and building into the online format. Now that I have finished and submitted the Business Plan I can concentrate on the very pleasant task of lightly editing the content that has been written.

One of the most amazing features of e-LPRAS is the very high quality of the work being submitted. I always knew that plastic surgeons were high-achievers and all-round performers. That has never been so clear to me as it is now. Our authors come from a broad cross-section - relatively junior trainees (with consultants as senior authors), senior trainees, consultants and some colleagues from other specialities. A team of clinical psychologists has completed a number of sessions for Module One and then gobbled up all the other sessions that have a psychology focus from the other, yet-to-be-released modules. Gemma from Changing Faces has contributed a couple of really excellent sessions on the patient's perspective and the role of support groups.

So thank you to all our talented contributors. Let's keep the  momentum up and get the whole of Module One online this year for launch at Winter BAPRAS. As soon as I get a decision from BAPRAS Council I will release another batch of sessions to be written. There will be a round robin to everyone on my emailing list so if you have not contacted me yet, please do so.

Best wishes from your very happy Clinical Lead!

Business Plan now complete

I have spent the past few weeks writing a Business Plan to apply to BAPRAS Council for funding to continue the project. This has been a big task but it is now complete and the document (all 40 pages) is now off to BAPRAS to be included in the Council papers for their next meeting at the end of September. Hopefully I will have convinced them that e-LRAS is a really important project that is worth supporting through to completion. The project team has developed some really efficient working practices and we have squeezed the budget as low as we can get it, but the cost to complete is still around £1M. This is a lot of money in anyone's eyes, even though it will be split into smaller annual amounts. We are now entirely dependent on the vision and generosity of BAPRAS to enable us to finish the project. I have a presentation to make at the Council meeting and then we will have a decision. Watch this space...

Review of the week

Well, it's been a really busy week at the BAPRAS Summer Meeting in Oxford. The e-LPRAS project has been well-received by all those attendees who have dropped by the stand to talk to us. There  have also been discussions about the new ISCP curriculum for plastic surgery. We are confident that our material will continue to match the new curriculum. Completion of relevant e-LPRAS sessions will be excellent evidence that trainees are meeting the knowledge requirements of ISCP.

The really good news is that the sessions for Module 1 of the e-LPRAS project (Essentials of Plastic Surgery) have all been allocated to authors. We are therefore on schedule to be able to launch that module on line by the end of this year!

Thank you to everyone who has volunteered to help. As I said in my talk on e-learning at the meeting, the project will only be successful if we all feel ownership of it.

e-LPRAS at BAPRAS

It has been a fantastic week at the Summer BAPRAS meeting in Oxford. Steve and I have been manning the e-LPRAS stand in the exhibitors hall and we have been very excited by the interest of all plastic surgeons. We have also recruited a lot of new authors and potential authors. Module 1 now has only 4 sessions needing a content editor - so if you want to get involved before the end of this year, now is the time to get in touch.

The quality of the content being returned to us has far surpassed what we were hoping for. Steve is busy turning the content into a format that is engaging and interesting, using the best instructional and educational design principles. Although we have been sending authors a Powerpoint template, some have found it easier to write in Word and Steve has been just as successful in using this material.

We still hope to release the content for Module 1 (Essentials of Plastic Surgery) on-line before the end of the year. Watch this spot for more news!

Overwhelming response

The first batch of e-learning sessions has been returned by our keen authors and I am pleased to report that things are looking great! Some of the sessions are more or less ready to run. Most need a tiny bit of tweaking. Others need a little more work, mostly in terms of style and structure rather than content. One or two authors have been so keen that they have gone beyond their allocated learning objectives and overlapped with other sessions. Not a problem. I have had to be hard-hearted about using the delete button on one or two but some authors have made such a good start on other sessions that...guess what?...I have allocated them that session too!

Steve, our Instructional Designer, is a real whizz at taking the content, playing with it and turning it into a really sophisticated e-learning session. He sees  where the order is not quite perfect, moves things around, makes the content build logically from start to conclusion and adds one or two interactional exercises. Hey presto! As if by magic the whole things looks ready to go. My job now is to check the content (where I feel confident to do so) or send it out to peer reviewers (where it is outside my subject area).

So thanks to everyone who has started writing for us. If you are still lurking in the margins please get in touch to see how you could get involved too. Steve and I both have educational qualifications and we are happy to lead you through the early stages and teach you how to work with the material. Most authors have found a Skype conversation in the first few weeks to be really helpful with keeping the session on track.

I look forward to the next batch arriving soon!

SESSION WRITING WELL UNDER WAY

Thank you to all of the authors who have been sending me their completed sessions. A lot of hard work has gone into creating them and I am very grateful. We have found that it is often helpful to have a Skype conversation quite early on in the process so that we can support you with the level and style of content. Those authors who have communicated with me in this way have been able to complete their work much faster.

I am also delighted to inform you that Changing Faces have agreed to write two of our sessions (Dealing with Disfigurement and The Role of Patient Support Groups). 


Steve Gibbons, our Instructional Designer, is now on board. As he is working full-time on the project you will find that a lot of the communications in the future come from him. Once he has settled in I shall be needing as many sessions as possible written and returned so that I can keep him busy!

The third batch of sessions has been sent out this week. Please let me know if you would like to write any of these.  Once I have all the responses I will send you out a Powerpoint template onto which you will write your material. There have been some problems with the version of template that I have been using due to incompatibility between Open Office and Powerpoint 2010. I have given in and reloaded Powerpoint 2003 onto my PC, which does not seem to have the same problem as Open Office, so hopefully this has been resolved.

Best wishes

elpras.project@googlemail.com

Welcome to our Instructional Designer

Work is progressing very well on the e-LPRAS project. In a couple of weeks Stephen Gibbons starts work full-time as our Instructional Designer. Steve has a background in education and e-learning. He has been working with other e-Learning for Healthcare projects over the past few years but will be concentrating on the plastic surgery project from now on. I shall be relying on his wealth of experience to keep all of us in line!

I am enormously grateful to the authors who have taken on some of the work and are beavering away on their sessions. The first one has already been returned to me, which is excellent because it means that Steve will have plenty of work line up when he starts.

If you have not yet volunteered to help please get in touch and I would be delighted to explain what we need.


 Best wishes!

First batch of sessions being written

There are now over 20 content authors busy working on writing sessions for the e-LPRAS project. Thank you all of you. I  believe that one author expects to  be finished next week. That is what I call efficiency! That is the sort of contribution that the project needs with another 600 or so sessions to write!

I will be working on the project most Mondays and will be available to discuss any difficulties or concerns that might you have.  Remember that the first draft does not need to be the finished product and there will be lots of help from the team on formatting etc.

I have also recruited a team of psychologists to help with the relevant sessions. James Partridge from Changing Faces has been crucial in helping me to make those links. Thank you James.

We have got off to a really good start and I will be posting weekly updates to keep you informed of progress. Please get in touch if you have only just found us and would like to contribute. The more the merrier!

e-LPRAS is up and running

I am pleased to announce that, thanks to the generous support of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons (BAPRAS), the e-learning project for plastic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgery (e-LPRAS) is up and running again. This project will take several years to complete but, in due course, will cover the whole curriculum for plastic surgery trainees in the United Kingdom. I will be working as the National Clinical Lead for this project one day a week. Volunteers will be writing the content for individual sessions, which will consist of 20 to 30 minutes of learning as experienced a trainee sitting at a PC. The primary target audience is plastic surgery trainees in years 5 who are studying for the FRCS (Plast) examination.

The curriculum consists of around 1000 sessions. These will be released in batches as modules are completed. The 1st module to be written will cover the essentials of plastic surgery. There are around 20 authors are currently working on the sessions for this module. Approximately 114 sessions have already been written. I am a the whole module will be released towards the end of 2011.

If you would like to become involved as a content author or peer reviewer please get in touch. Full job description is available on request.