Since the late 1990s there has been a rapid proliferation of global health academic programs around the world. However, evaluations of these programs suggest that their quality often falls below expectations. In a recent survey 85 percent of global health employers agreed that academia should better prepare students for global health practice. The top skill that graduates were perceived to lack was understanding the realities of practicing global health in the field.
Arguably, one of the reasons contributing to the problem is the lack of experiential learning opportunities for global health students. Experiential learning is a process through which students develop knowledge, practical skills and values from practical experiences outside a traditional classroom setting. Experiential learning exists when a trainee cognitively, affectively and behaviorally processes the knowledge, skills and attitudes in a learning situation characterized by a high level of active involvement. An illustrative example of experiential learning is training in clinical medicine, where students spend only the first two years in classrooms studying basic sciences and then move to teaching hospitals to master clinical skills through supervised practice. For global health students, the costs, logistics and ultimately the safety issues make it impractical to gain practical experiences in the field: it is not feasible to deploy them to the sites of infectious disease outbreaks, refugee camps, military conflicts or natural disasters. Therefore, global health training largely remains a theoretical, classroom-based exercise.
Virtual reality (VR) is the computer-generated reproduction of a three-dimensional environment simulating a user's presence in the real world or in an imagined world. Simulation facilitates learning through immersion, reflection and practice, minus the risks inherent in a similar real-life experience. Due to these features VR has moved from being a tool of the military and aviation industries to the mainstream of education and professional development as educators have yielded increasing benefits from immersive experiences.
The field of global health can immensely benefit from integrating VR technology innto training curricula. VR can provide the opportunity to "bring" simulated immersive/interactive global health field scenarios to the classroom, or to "send" students to simulated field missions without actually leaving the classroom.
We collaborate with leading VR experts on developing VR-based training course on global health. The first training module has been developed on Ebola, which integrates a range of technological and pedagogical aspects that are being currently tested with global health students and faculty at several universities. The feedback will help us improve the quality for developing the full global health training program that will include key global health topics, such as - environmental pollution and health, climate change and health, refugees' health, global health security and others. Please monitor this page for periodic updates.
