Teaching Innovation

For years, DTI has been providing students with valuable lectures, training, and experiences that will grant them the tools needed to navigate the organ donation and transplantation process as future medical professionals.

Due to the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there has been an increased need for new tools and methods used to carry out educational trainings and courses online, without compromising quality. To meet these needs, DTI has made great strides in innovation to digitalize its training courses. Using virtual reality, interactive video gaming, live broadcasting and virtual meeting spaces, DTI’s training courses continue to remain just as engaging, impactful, and meaningful as face-to-face courses.

DTI has been able to adapt its workshops using live recording software to create interactive live lectures and workshops. Here, technology is used to allow students to put themselves in the shoes of a doctor and live the experience as if it were real.

By providing fully immersive experiences to students, DTI provides extensive details in lectures. In live lectures, students are given the opportunity to see material used in an operation room. A team of professionals sets up a studio representing an operating room where they lecture students who join these meetings virtually. Students are immersed in educational material and are asked about specific cases. This form of education enhances the learning experience and takes students outside the traditional classroom while still respecting the constraints of the pandemic.

DTI has innovated and digitalized its online courses through the gamification of some training activities. Through these innovations, several TPM courses have been carried out in virtual modality via interactive video gaming.

These courses are traditionally face-to-face in which participation, teamwork and hands-on simulation is always encouraged and supported. Due to the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, the courses have been adapted to an online modality, applying the latest innovations in educational material.

The game allows participants to navigate the process of donor detection and assessment, while challenging them to communicate with the donor character and their family adequately and empathetically. Students gain clinical experience in potential donor assessment from this game, through clinical case reviews.

In collaboration with Immersium Studio, DTI has developed an immersive learning app that provides hands-on learning to students through a virtual reality platform.

One instance in which this is used is our ‘International Workshop in Family Approach for Organ Donation’. Here, the VR app enables the viewer to act as a medical professional, with the objective of navigating the process of meeting a patient’s family, learning about them and ultimately delivering bad news to the patient’s family within the organ and tissue process. The goal of this workshop is to give students a realistic look at the challenges that the family approach presents in the real world.

Alongside the ‘International Workshop in Family Approach for Organ Donation’, DTI has developed an interactive 360 video experience of the TPM (Transplant Procurement Manager) journey. Here, users – often healthcare professionals, transplant clinicians, bioscience professionals, transplant coordinators, and those involved in the medical fields related to organ donation – are given the opportunity to virtually visit a hospital with Spanish donation and transplantation programs. This innovative technology provides users with a first-person experience of a hospital visit, gives them the understanding of what the Spanish model looks like with regards to its organization in donation and transplantation.