In 2020, under Erasmus+ Key Action 2, the European Union issued a call for grant applications to support strategic partnerships for digital readiness in education during situations such as the COVID pandemic. The FORCE consortium application was successful (Project Reference Number: 2020-1-IE02-KA226-HE-00783) and the project ran from 1st May 2021 until 31st October 2023..
The FORCE project was designed in response to the COVID pandemic and its impact on clinical placement learning for student Radiographers. It is a pre-requisite of Radiographer education across Europe that students have clinical placement learning. During the pandemic, a near crisis in sustaining clinical placements reinforced the need for learning options and digital transformation within Radiography curricula.
The project consortium shared expertise and resources to develop a virtual learning environment (VLE) laid out to simulate the workflow and RISPACS user interface in a clinical imaging and radiotherapy department. The VLE was developed in Moodle and is hosted in Digicampus, a collaborative academic platform. The clinical case simulations are overlaid with interactive learning content developed in H5P.com. There are currently four work areas: Radiography, Image Interpretation, Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy. There is capacity for the FORCE VLE to be populated with additional clinical simulations in the same or other work areas, such as Computed Tomography or Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
It is the aspiration of the consortium that the FORCE VLE will continue to develop as an ongoing academic collaboration.
