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About Us
Quality, reliability and safety are primary concerns in your professional world—and in ours. At SiTEL of MedStar Health, we provide a comprehensive education and training solution to those who work in healthcare. As seasoned professionals, we have many years of experience in the practice and management of medicine and healthcare, respectively. We understand how training impacts performance in hospitals.
Products and Services
On Demand Learning
We help organizations leverage their own talent and build learning communities.
Clinical Simulation
We created and continue to manage two of the nation’s largest simulation centers.
Instructional Design
Our experiential learning approach blends clinical simulation, virtual worlds and on demand learning.
Live Events
Our Live Events provide an opportunities to learn about technologies, methodologies, and groundbreaking thinking.
Blog
Our integrated learning services are designed to empower healthcare organizations by combining Instructional Design, Clinical Simulation, Live Events, and On Demand Learning.
Learn. Practice. Perform.
CHANGE IS THE RESULT OF ALL
TRUE LEARNING.
INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN REQUIRES EXPERIENCE & CREATIVITY
Achieving Expert Performance
Society has always recognized exceptional individuals, whose performance in sports, the arts, science, and healthcare is vastly superior to that of the rest of the population. Through our integrated research, development and instructional design efforts, we translate our understanding of clinical experts and exceptional performance into healthcare education interventions. Using an Experiential Learning Framework, each intervention blends the worlds of clinical simulation with virtual simulation. We transform the real world experiences of healthcare professionals into learning that can be facilitated and measured.
THE FUNDAMENTALS of LEARNING EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Designing meaningful learning experiences is about people, their activities, and the context of those activities.
Really great learning experiences are deeply rooted with insights into motivations, desires, emotions, cultural and social patterns, beliefs, and other deeper considerations.
People refers to us (as individuals or like groups) and the things that make us who we are, independent of any activities.This includes learned and natural behaviors, desires (which may or may not be verbalized) as well as related things like belief systems, prior experiences, emotions, personality and more. In respect to specific activities, we do assume roles such as user, producer, consumer, fan, stakeholder, partner or employee. But, in defining people only by these roles, we lose a complete picture of the person.
Context here is defined as any information that might affect the activity being carried out by a person. External contexts are those things directly affecting the activity itself, and might include the environment, social groups, historical patterns or simply the constraints of particular device. Internal contexts are those things affecting the person's behavior or mental state, such as the recent loss of a job or being elated by a kind deed. From this perspective, it’s worth noting that the extreme external context will include the business and technology environments, as well as the larger social and cultural context in which activities occur.
Activities describes the things people do.This can be a task-focused item, but might also include actions taken that aren’t necessarily things affecting the person’s behavior or mental directed toward accomplishing a goal (e.g. entertainment oriented experiences.). Activities can also be simply things done to make one feel a certain way (with no explicit task, per se).
Evidence-based Practice Drives Instructional Design
Evidence-based Practice and the need for new technologies is on an upward trajectory, but what does it mean for those of us in simulation and education? Simulation and education has only reached a small measure of its potential because it doesn’t utilize Evidence-based Practice. Evidence drives the design of objectives, practice, and ultimately, the embedded assessment. Working with knowledge translation experts, our instructional design team applies the best available evidence gained from scientific method (including statistical validity, clinical relevance, currency, and peer-review acceptance) to create your instructional “blueprint.”
DELIBERATE PRACTICE AND THE ACQUISITION OF EXPERT PERFORMANCE
N * Practice = Knowledge
LEARNING THEORIES THAT CAN BE APPLIED TO SIMULATION
- Constructivism
- Experiential Learning
- Adult Learning Theory
- Novice to Expert
- Brain-based Learning
- Social Cognitive Theory
Our Experiential Learning Framework Models Expert Performance
The current learning paradigm still relies predominantly on the apprenticeship model, establishing competency based on the number of performed procedures on real patients. Increasingly though, healthcare education needs an instructional strategy that incorporates evidence based practice, competency models, and scaffolding of expert performance. These considerations drove the development of our proprietary Experiential Learning Framework. The result is highly interactive, evidence-based educational interventions designed to improve medical problem solving (critical thinking) and decision making; and develop expert clinical performance. For assessments to be truly "authentic", they must be linked to a specific instructional context and, ideally, occur as part of an ongoing learning process. Each of our assessments incorporate feedback loops based on systematic analytic methods for collecting evidence-based metrics. By taking a quantitative approach to measurement we increasingly validate learning transfer.
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING FRAMEWORK
Blend Physical and Virtual Worlds to Achieve a Learning Continuum
Our Experiential Learning Framework transforms these instructional considerations into a learning experience which blends clinical simulation with virtual simulation. We believe that blended learning should be viewed as a instructional approach that combines the effectiveness and socialization opportunities (live team training) of clinical simulation with the technologically enhanced, active learning possibilities of virtual worlds.
In other words, blended learning should be approached not merely as a temporal construct, but rather as a fundamental redesign of the instructional model with the following characteristics: (1) A shift from lecture- to student-centered instruction in which students become active and interactive learners; (2) Increases in interaction between student-instructor, student-student, student-content, and student-outside resources; and (3) Embedded formative and summative assessment mechanisms for students, instructor and debriefer.
