The new digital installation offers far more teaching flexibility than was possible before

Digital technology boost for teaching Nursing clinical skills

22/09/2023

A six workstation WolfVision vSolution MATRIX active learning classroom collaboration system - the first of its kind in Ireland - has been installed in the Nursing Clinical Education Centre.

“We have been very impressed,” said Justin Dawson, Senior Technical Officer at DCU. “It truly is a ready-to-go, all-in-one, out of the box solution and configuration and setup were problem free.”

The new system is a significant improvement on the old which took 30 seconds to power on in each room, and was restricted to a single source display, which limited digital teaching options.

In addition, the old user interface was overly complex, causing significant hindrance for staff wishing to make the most of the system. There were also difficulties in connecting wireless to the displays, and persistent issues with audio and video streams.

In contrast, the newly installed interface is intuitive and adaptable to teaching scenarios. Staff can easily connect adjacent rooms from a central hub (Cynap pro).

The hub can view adjacent room content, and content can be shared from the hub to the adjacent rooms and vice versa, making it perfect for observation sessions.

Staff can see and select live camera streams from the main hub and adjacent rooms. Up to four sources can be displayed on screen in the five adjacent rooms (Cynap Core Pro).

Furthermore, staff can annotate over any source using 24-inch touch screens in each room and via Windows, Mac, Android, and iPad apps.

Integrated whiteboards are available on all devices, and staff can save whiteboards, annotations, and record full sessions, with the option to save all material to an external hard drive.

The system was introduced for the academic year 2023/24, and students will be surveyed at the year end to collect their feedback on the system.

Staff

Workshops for staff are scheduled to be offered every month. These will evolve over the year based on staff feedback and their growing familiarity with the system. Also, at the end of the year, a satisfaction survey will be distributed to all staff.

Technical officers are granted default access to administrative pages, which results in time and cost savings for the School. This access enables them to troubleshoot efficiently, eliminating the need to engage third party vendors for support – a practice that prompted the transition to WolfVision.

"With the new system we have far more flexibility than we ever had before,” said Patrick Doyle, Senior Technical Officer. “It fully meets the School's and DCU's requirements for implementation of Universal Design for Learning in current and future SNPCH programmes."