British firm Daden have been releasing virtual worlds products for a while now – we covered their in-world web browser last July. Their latest launch is an “open-source learning system or virtual worlds, the web and iPhone”. Its moniker is PIVOTE and it’s the result of a project called PREVIEW funded by the UK Government’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The project’s focus was problem-based learning in virtual worlds, and PIVOTE is the end-result. Paramedic training for St George’s, University of London was the initial focus that’s led to final product.

Essentially, Pivote is a web-based learning management system where detailed exercises can be formulated as fairly standard, text-driven scenarios with decision pathways, or as avatar driven exercises in Second Life or OpenSim (Daden states its platform can easily be adapted to other virtual worlds). The text-based options can also be utilised in-world via what is presumably Daden’s in-world browser. St George’s have a sim in Second Life (click here to see for yourself) that is publicly accessible.

St George’s Senior Lecturer in Paramedic Science, Alan Rice said “This programme provides the students with a fun learning environment, where they can afford to make mistakes online, which they could not afford to make in the real world. When they make a mistake online, they are always keen not to make the same mistake again.” A paramedic student at St George’s, Fiona Cropp, was happy with the virtual training process – “It’s a really useful tool. It’s much better to be able to actually perform treatments rather than just talk about it. Everyone is online at the same time so you can bounce ideas off each other and make an informed decision. I had never used Second Life before, but I found it really easy to get on with.”

A useful overview of the paramedic training scenario can be viewed here:

Pivote isn’t the first integrated training solution using virtual worlds, but it’s certainly progressed things considerably. The challenge for any platform is convincing key management that scarce health dollars should be sunk into virtual worlds-based training. Health professionals and academics are perfectly positioned to demonstrate just that, and there’s no shortage of evidence of the cost benefits of effectively trained clinicians. Anything that increases the confidence of new practitioners in the breadth of the clinical decision-making in a cost-effective way, will surely gain some traction in what is usually a very conservative space.

Anyone wanting to install PIVOTE for themselves can do so for free by installing it on their own servers or paying Daden to host it for them. The full instructions can be found by browsing the ‘Getting Started’ section of the PIVOTE website.