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Ringby B.1, Duus L.1
1University College of Northern Denmark, Department of Physiotherapy, Aalborg, Denmark
Background: Society calls for creative, innovative and enterprising health professionals who have abilities to work interdisciplinary. New learning methods are required to develop new skills. Health care students must develop skills that enable them to create, develop and take action upon new services in new or existing organizations. Teaching interdisciplinary cooperation in relation to creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship requires an unconventional approach. Students must not only learn ABOUT interdisciplinary work and its theories - they must also be trained to DO so. In order to think differently students must cooperate to develop ideas and transfer common professional knowledge into concrete concepts for the benefit of practice. Thus Camp as a learning activity was introduced to engage students and provide a space to try out how to cope with uncertainty, complexity and to take action in collaboration with peers from other healthcare BA programs.
Purpose: The aim was to investigate if CAMP as a learning activity can contribute to support students in gaining hands-on experience in interdisciplinary cooperation in the field of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Methods: An 8-week interdisciplinary module with approximately 235 students from five health care BA programs (physiotherapy, midwifery, radiography, occupational therapy and nursing) participated in one 24-hour innovation camp during 2014-2016 - altogether 1175 students. A specific health-topic was chosen for each camp. Participation was compulsory. Four lecturers were involved as organizers and professional supervisors. Moreover 12-24 Innovation and Entrepreneurship bachelor-students from a business academy participated as facilitators during each camp as a peer-to-peer learning activity. Ideas developed by interdisciplinary groups of six-seven students were presented to and evaluated by Critical friends lecturers from various BA-programs and business people from outside the UCN.
The camp method encourages a student-participatory and an inter-professional approach required to think out-of-the-box and the concept developed by each group serves as examination basis for group-exams following the camp. Five camps were evaluated by students from 2014 to 2016. Data consisted of on-line questionnaires with closed and open ended questions. 487 questionnaires were completed.
Results: Findings showed that 86 % of students evaluated the camp-topic as relevant, 59 % that peer facilitators gave sufficient input during the proces and 93 % evaluated themselves as active and participating. Students stated that faciltators had knowledge on innovation processes and therefore capable of guiding and creating a positive learning environment. Findings also pointed out that the camp format can provide energy, possibility for interesting dicussions and new challenging learning experiences.
Conclusion(s): Camp as a learning activity based on peer-faciltation and interdiciplinarity combined with a professional innovative focus seems to be a relevant and rewarding approach when trying to engage students to think differently in an interdisciplinary setting.
Implications: Camp as a method has been implemented in curricula for five health care BA-programmes. New learning actvities must continously be tried out in order to create engaging learning spaces for students to become creative and reflective professionals.
Funding acknowledgements: No funding
Topic: Education: methods of teaching & learning
Ethics approval: No ethics approval required
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
