Video podcasts or vodcasts are increasingly used by a range of healthcare professions to aid development of practical skills and clinical reasoning. There have been advances in the use of information technology in medical nursing dentistry and undergraduate physiotherapy education (Kennedy et al. 2008; Hurst 2016). However there is little known about using vodcasts to develop mastery in post graduate physiotherapy clinical education.
Development of advanced clinical skills is a key learning outcome in for a master’s degree in paediatric physiotherapy. When preparing students for clinical placement in youth sport or performing arts there is a requirement for students to complete a practical skills module. The teaching and learning of physiotherapeutic skills and clinical reasoning are usually delivered using traditional strategies. Traditional approaches include lecturer demonstrations workshops to develop clinical reasoning case studies and student practise. An inability to guarantee either models with specific clinical injuries or pathologies on specific term dates or standardised high quality demonstration of clinical expertise are amongst the challenges faced in providing postgraduate clinical education by traditional means. These are exacerbated by large classes gathering around a single model precluding adequate repetitive exposure to the correct techniques.
The development of new information and communications technology is now coupled with expectations of a contemporary group of students often referred to as the “net generation” (Kennedy et al. 2008). Vodcasts are one form of e-learning technology whereby video files can be made available to students via the internet to download to mobile devices (Strickland et al. 2012). Mobile or m-learning affords the learner the opportunity to access these whenever wherever and however they want to (Hashemi et al. 2011). This has opened up new opportunities to explore the ways that skills based education is delivered to students in a multi-media learning experience. Vodcasts when implemented as blended learning offer great versatility and potential when used as a pedagogical tool embedded within a post graduate physiotherapy curriculum to enhance learning.
