Articles-Thought Leadership Creating Experts In Healthcare | Page 5

“We all forget things that we might need to know. If
there is a skill or piece of information that we need to
know but aren’t using daily, it needs to be reinforced.”
Experience enhances learning and can even be incorporated into online learning settings
Experiential learning is defined differently
depending on how one defines experience. Dr.
Yosaitis explains that educational experience
doesn’t always have to be a simulation. “I think a
lecture or online learning can be experiential if it
either tells a story or makes an argument,” he
explains. “No one is going to remember a list
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from watching a video or doing an interactive
module. No matter how good it is, they’re only
going to come away with a few things, and how
they’re going to learn those things is the same
way humans have always learned—by listening to
a story or an argument.”
Information must be reality-based and reinforced for learners to retain it
“Education is context specific,” Dr. Yosaitis says.
“Someone could be great at performing
resuscitation in a calm simulation lab but unable
to perform in an emergency room where people
are yelling at them to go faster and asking what
needs to be done.” Dr. Yosaitis explains that in
order to prevent students from freezing in
real-life scenarios, the learning needs to be based
in reality. SiTEL believes that real-life learning can
be accomplished through virtual reality, and they
are actively pioneering this concept. Dr. Yosaitis
suggests that virtual reality is an emerging model
that will shape healthcare education and is key to
achieving real-life learning.
Additionally, Dr. Yosaitis emphasizes the
“educational half-life,” or how long someone
remembers what he or she learned. “We all
forget things that we might need to know. If
there is a skill or piece of information that we
need to know but aren’t using daily, it needs to
be reinforced.” He concludes that reinforcement
is key to retention and will continue to be
something that healthcare educators stress in
the future.