Jason Eric Looper
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soft study skills – Medicine (EFL/ESL)
Dr. Sensitive
A soft skills-focused module for medical professionals offering authentic, real-world scenarios, and opportunities for personal and professional reflection.
The Challenge
As lead designer on this self-initiated project, the aim was to strengthen Japanese medical students’ English language fluency and confidence to ensure better communication with patients overseas.
Goals:
- Reduce anxiety caused by unfamiliarity between Japanese trainee doctors and their North American and British patients during medical exams.
- Trigger mindfulness (empathy) for ‘others’.
- Confront personal biases and misguided assumptions directed at ‘others’.
Objectives: Given a series of role-play scenarios, medical professionals must:
- successfully execute authentic interactions with patients in English (target language) with relative accuracy.
- evaluate the critical nature of these encounters.
- select among choices that best demonstrate the physician’s (avatar) empathy for the patients.
If successful, I hoped the project would effectively demonstrate to faculty the merits of an in-house e-learning program.
Will your unconscious biases affect a medical consultation in English ?
Check your biases. A look at some of the diverse patients physicians encounter
Authentic scenario. What’s the appropriate reaction?
Cultural Underpinnings
The module is premised on the Medical English department chair’s belief that Japan’s homogeneity may be at the root of the students’ somewhat weak interpersonal communication skills when training at hospitals abroad. And that no matter their English language competence, they too often show discomfort with English-speaking patients — even during mock examinations. To improve their experience and rapport with English-speaking patients, the module is designed for students to investigate their own assumptions and biases, while also learning to handle occasionally bigoted attitudes directed towards them by intolerant patients.
Where’s the role play?
Aren’t these illustrations a little…childish?
Evaluation
I followed Kirkpatrick principles but only evaluated the Reaction level since the intervention ended up being far more limited in scope compared to the initial pitch.
Reaction: While measuring whether the learners found the training relevant to their role, engaging and useful. I was able to quantify student reactions using a paper-based, post-training survey that employed Likert scales. There was also additional space for open-ended, written responses. Learners were asked to rate their overall experience and satisfaction with the:
- how closely the tasks matched the objectives
- usability
- relevance of the content to their needs
I tabulated the learner responses from the survey and then devised a formula to establish a baseline of acceptable performance. Using this standard, I found that a solid number of learners (60%) felt the tasks matched the objectives. The other 40% wrote of their “irritation” about the module’s “incompleteness” and the fact that available tasks were mostly declarative rather than performative. That is to say, there was a lot of ‘say’ (description/declaration), but not enough ‘do’ (interactive learning tasks). This a very good point that I have since taken even more seriously.
Users’ annoyance was also reflected in terms of usability, where 91% were ‘somewhat dissatisfied’ with the functionality of buttons, slides and such. Shots were even taken at the illustrations, “aren’t these illustrations a little childish”😩one user wrote. Other written comments included: “where’s the role-play part?; “why is this whole section grayed out?” There were also complaints about basic functionality, “the slider movement is a little uneven.” A programming error showed up with some noting “my name didn’t appear in the field when typed.”
Department administrators who saw low-fidelity iterations of the role-play branching section were also let down that it wasn’t included in the prototype. Of course, I accept these complaints. I had promised that the CBT version of the patient-doctor, branching role play would be the key element offering explicit, “immersive” (my word word choice in meetings) training, but ultimately I couldn’t deliver in the allotted time frame. Nevertheless, 100% of learners felt the module was relevant to their needs, despite not getting the practice they had hoped for. Such reactions, while humbling and discouraging, are a necessary part of the ID process.
Design Choices and Reflection
Design choices, like the selection of vector characters, and resolving not to use audio or a glossary (among other things) as part of the UX, were decisions informed by the short turnaround of 3 weeks, and the lack of a budget. Upon reflection I should have predicted these issues and narrowed the objectives; rather than raising anticipation to unnecessarily high levels in terms of the scope, it would have been better to temper expectations.
Furthermore, budget was tight and some users enjoyed the “lightheartedness” of the illustrations while others felt their use was “childish”. If I’d had access to a paid stock photo and vector corpus, it would have given the prototype more polish. On the other hand, the set of characters used was able to successfully communicate the intended design ethos. These free vectors offered an accurate representation of patients in many Western hospitals. But, as confronting ‘diversity’ and ‘biased assumptions’ being goals, it’s not a stretch to say that the character set was actually a savvy choice. Besides, the color pallet gave the design some ‘pop’ that might have been missing otherwise.
Time constraints were the most difficult frame factor to overcome. As mentioned above, the department chair and other stakeholders had been expecting role-play branching scenarios that were promised and demonstrated in earlier, low-fi iterations of the module. And learner’s felt ‘fooled’ because there was a ‘grayed out’ portal to the branching scenario that made them eager to try it, but was ultimately frustrating because they could access it.
The short turnaround time also severely hindered the development of a more elegant and user-friendly UX. There is no doubt that more a sophisticated set of consistently placed UX buttons and a more polished interatvity would have improved the accessibility and usability. With user control opportunities for instant feedback (e.g. tooltips, etc.) available, the user experience would have certainly benefited. For these reasons, while the design made the most of limited resources, the time constraints ended up the most difficult to overcome. It severely hampered the overall quality of the prototype.
Anyway, on this project I took a bit of an ‘L’. But, I didn’t dwell on it too much; rationalizing that it was better to learn hard lessons about time management, and over-promising and under-delivering, in situations like this where the stakes are lower. After all, this was a self-initiated project carried out at my own institution and among colleague I know well. Delivering such an underwhelming project after promising so much more would surely be more risky in a Corporate role. Thankfully, despite the issues, the Medical English department did end up convinced of the potential merits of using eLearning/CBT with its emphasis on self-directed (asynchronous) learning. Overall, a lot of good lessons were learned in this project.
Dr. Sensitive
interpersonal training for medical practitioners studying abroad
Client
Tohoku Univ. Medical English Dept.
Year
2020
Role
Project initiation
Objectives preparation
Survey design
User Interviews
Low-fidelity rapid prototyping
High-fidelity prototyping
Usability testing & Validation
Presentation
Evaluation
Design Tools
Noteworthy
Illustrator
PowerPoint
Articulate 360
Embedding instruction in a familiar context enhances student achievement and attitudes, with context being key to the design and development of problem-based learning.
Barrow & Kelson, 1996; Spronken-Smith, 2005