Abstract:

Introduction:
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced innovation in university pedagogy, particularly for fieldwork experiences in health professional programs. Deprived of observational clinical placements at the beginning of a training pathway, leaders worked on a solution to reconstitute a distance clinical learning environment exposing the student to a variety of clientele without having access to clinical settings. Now that the pandemic crisis is better controlled, the "in-person" experiences in clinical settings have been resumed, but the professional training program has maintained a third-party learning environment focused on the use of technopedagogies (TPLE-U).

Conceptual framework:
This university program is based on a competency-based program approach (CBPA). This framework was chosen for this study because it allows the development of the professional competencies to be spread out over the training continuum.

Objective:
To explore the impact on competency development of the forced transformation of a traditional clinical training activity into a TPLE-U.

Method:
The TPLE-U is now being conducted over three consecutive years. A qualitative approach based on the analysis of pedagogical material was selected to conduct this study.

Results:
Overall, the preliminary results show that the new TPLE-U, favors the development of competencies in students enrolled in a health program. Similarly, the use of digital video recordings of real clinical situations increases the significance of learning. Collaborative virtual documents also allow students to be active in their learning. Additionally, the harmonization of asynchronous and synchronous teaching allows reflections on key knowledge in both reflective and collaborative practice. These results are consistent with CBPA in that they promote the significance of learning, allow for the transfer of knowledge to different practice contexts, and facilitate the development of expected competencies according to the staggering of their development across the curriculum.

Discussion/Conclusion:
Without ignoring the environments in which the practices take place, the analysis of the data makes it possible to grasp the importance of examining the potential of educational devices, situations and practices. The TPLE-U, introduces very interesting side impacts since it allows, by offering all students the same learning resources and the same opportunities to exploit them, a true equity of training means. On this basis, it also makes it possible to open up to co-learning and co-construction, and to participate in the development of competencies that are more collective than individual, without missing out on the expected competencies. This design also reinterprets the professional posture of teachers and fieldwork coordinators who, in order to best support student, become "facilitators" in active pedagogy. This change in posture requires that the teachers’ professional expertise does not hinder this "learner-oriented" decentering that is required in the "out of the clinic" distance learning implemented during the health crisis.

Keywords:

Competency-based program approach, Learning environment, COVID-19, Competency development, Fieldwork.