Over the past couple of years our Faculty of Health Sciences and Wellbeing has been very busy redeveloping their buildings and kitting them out with all the latest and greatest facilities and technologies, things like an almost exact replica of a hospital ward, complete with Sim People, and high definition cameras and screens in every room. Remember the Immersive Interactive room I wrote about? They’re getting one of those put in as we speak.
Something else they’ve purchased is VEO, a video annotation tool that lets you tag videos either live, using their iPad app, or in a browser for videos recorded on other devices and uploaded to their system. There are two scenarios the Faculty has in mind for this tool, having students use it themselves for their own learning by, for example, analysing each other’s performance at a given task, looking for strengths and areas that need improving, and to assist academics doing OSCEs (objective structured clinical examinations), or even replace the paper forms altogether, if it works well.
VEO is a fairly new tool, a spin-off from a development at Newcastle University, but it is now being used by a number of universities. Being local we benefited from having one of the people who developed the tool on site with us to explain the background, why it was developed, how it can be used and how we can administer it and help academics to make full use of it. It has a lot of potential, and also with it being a local start-up we have a great opportunity to work closely with VEO and contribute to their product development.
