Functional teams are a challenge for the designer, the faculty teaching, and the students engaged in distance learning. We discuss a course where learners experience team dynamics in interprofessional groups. Activities include individual, dyad, and team interactions; members experience and navigate team agreements, change, conflict, and power dynamics.
Distance and E-learning produce unique challenges in providing learners information and real-time experiences that transfer to their own environments. This contest is amplified when team members do not share common backgrounds, do not work synchronously, and are not co-located. The additional test presents itself within a University with a focus on interprofessionalism where learners may or may not come from clinical backgrounds in healthcare. Can you take such a diverse group of people and give them a distance learning experience in functioning as a team?
Rosalind Franklin University’s doctoral program in Interprofessional Healthcare Studies is the only one of its kind. As a class offering in this online learning environment, students must learn not only the theoretical foundations for building effective interprofessional teams, but must also have some walk-away experiences to better inform their future work. One opportunity is found in a course entitled, “Building Effective Interprofessional Teams.”
In this class, learners review academic articles, video presentations, models and frameworks, the IPEC competencies and other resources targeted at providing a foundation for understanding how teams work and why they function as they do. Additionally, students elect to join teams within the learning cohort with whom they must establish working team agreements (suited to their current learning environment), providing team-based as well as individual analysis of relevant information. Within their team, they reflect on processes and provide vital feedback about how well they functioned, including the utilization of peer evaluations. As a capstone to this course, students consider the dynamics of power within the team, also considering that on interprofessional teams a central tenet is the role of the patient and family in the healthcare decision process. This compels them to address issues of leadership and the assumption of power.
In this session, we will interactively examine the format of this course, which moves from individual to dyadic to team-based learning. We will explore resources utilized as well as activities employed to deepen conversations about what it is like to work in a team-based environment. Participants will respond to and share their own challenges and successes in providing similar experiences both in the online and the blended classroom. The goal will be to analyze and provide better resources for everyone in this exciting field of learning.