Blueprints of an Online Learning Environment for Teaching Complex Psychomotor Skills in First Aid

Abstract

As most of the life-threatening events, such as heart failure and trauma, occur out-of-hospital, first aid is considered crucial for a victim’s survival chances. Unfortunately, a substantial part of these psychomotor or consciously brain-controlled motor skills are executed poorly or incorrectly due to the inexperience of first aid attendants or low retention after training. Together with an enlarged demand over the past years for first aid skills within the business sector and, corresponding, the tremendous load in teaching hours, this high need for training sessions in first aid led to the development of an online learning environment for psychomotor skills within the domain of Health Sciences. Although online learning environments already exist for teaching cognitive skills, developing one for psychomotor skills is considered challenging as it has not been proven effective yet. What is considered important, however, is to avoid cognitive overload and to maintain learners’ motivation throughout the entire online learning environment. As such, to avoid cognitive overload, the designers used a cognitive instructional model, namely the 4C/ID model, and used it as a framework for their online learning environment. On top, choice options were added to the online learning environment to maintain motivation throughout the process of learning psychomotor skills. The ultimate goal lies in enabling the learner to perform the psychomotor skill fluently in practice. The design process of the online learning environment, the corresponding design challenges, failures, and how they were dealt with are described in detail.