Abstract:

The need for qualified health care workers and laboratory technicians in (bio)medical and clinical settings is an essential part of the fourth industrial revolution. More and more clinical labs are equipped with technically high advanced lab automates e.g. Cobas (Roche Diagnostics), Architect (Abbott), Healthineers (Siemens), Sysmex (Sysmex Europe) in order to respond to the required elevated capacity of lab diagnostics. Consequently, higher education programmes are challenged to prepare students in Biomedical Laboratory Technology (BLT) for the novel required skills and competences in the lab field.

In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic also urged the digital revolution in the higher education landscape. As a result, students become more autonomous and flexible in time and place independent learning competences. The introduction of a clinical virtual reality (VR) lab in the bachelor programme of BLT will meet those current demands giving students the opportunity to train lab skills on automates prior to an internship in a (bio)medical and/or clinical lab and working in the field. Special modules of the VR lab can be dedicated as application tutorials for job applicants or, can aid laboratory technician employees to prepare for job mutation towards working with highly advanced automates.

With the development of an integrated clinical virtual lab environment the BLT programme aims to equal the reality of the clinical lab work field and will therefore collaborate with Life Science companies and ICT specialists supporting a virtual laboratory information management system (LIMS). The VR lab will offer an integrated platform combining LIMS with quality control (QC) tools providing statistical tools including Westgard and Levey Jennings analysis. Users submerged in a clinical VR lab have to perform technical interventions on automates e.g. calibrations, buffer replacements, samples identification and assemblage, trouble shooting, etc.. They have to communicate with the automates by digital interfaces and ICT programming skills and will perform QC analysis on the obtained data from diagnosed patients samples. The students’ progress in the VR tool will be monitored by learning analytics to support coaching from novice, intermediate, advanced to expert level.

Keywords:

Biomedical sciences, Online/Virtual Laboratories, Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).