One of the newer things that we have been doing with our learners at the CEP is using reality televisions as a tool for learning. There are a surprising amount of (reality) TV shows that involve medics and the clinical environment. Some use has also been made of dramatized medical TV, but the use of reality TV is more recent. Within our programme other types of reality shows have also been used for teaching about feedback: ‘Dragon’s Den’ being one of them.

There is a very interesting website which can be used for this, called ‘Box of Broadcasts’. Here you can find and stream (but not download) video clips for use in teaching. The website has limited access to certain institutions, but anyone with log in details for the institution can use it; staff or student, since it is already copyrighted. This makes it a very useful resource for teachers, as is removes the barriers for OERs being mixed into teachers’ own lessons, making the OERs more suitable to be used in the local areas of the teachers (Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter 2018).

The most recent course that CEP has developed, Teaching in Clinical Environments, uses clips from reality TV shows like ‘GP’s after closed doors’, the clips are short ( 2-4 minutes) and can in fact be shortened to suitable size using Box of Broadcasts. Using the video clips followed by a group discussion means the different elements of clinical teaching can be pickup up on and evaluated. The different elements of the theory that the participants are asked to read beforehand, as well as their own experiences can be used to generate very valuable discussions between participants. This is particularly useful to create dialogues about role modelling and the hidden curriculum. The use of a video clip to talk about someone’s teaching makes participants much more likely to give honest feedback than they would if they were present in the environment themselves.

As with most ‘open learning’ this tool also has ‘hidden closures’ (Edwards 2015) in more ways than one. The website is available to most UK institutions, but no longer to institutions in Europe (thanks to Brexit). Within the UK, the availability to access this is limited to the institutions that have joined the website as well as your broadband, since it isn’t possible to download the video clips, you can only stream them. For the medical teachers, this can be a real issue, since they often don’t have an official affiliation with the University and internet connections can be very patchy in hospitals.

Then of course, there is the limitation of the website in that you can only stream that which is made available there. This corresponds to the point Edwards (2015) makes when he talks about inscrutability within openness in education and knowledge infrastructures, particularly in relation to algorithms and the like. The Box of Broadcast website seems to include all TV and radio broadcast material from the UK, but this would be almost impossible to check. Furthermore the search function is obviously based on an algorithm, one that we assume is correct, but is in fact inscrutable.

All in all, I think this website is a very good teaching tool which can really help teachers to make their materials more engaging, but it is useful to keep the limitations of these tools in mind and realise that the algorithm used for the search engine for instance, might not be as transparent as we would like.

Box of Broadcast, Learning on Screen, 2021 [online], [viewed 10 March 2021], Available from: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand

Edwards, R. (2015). Knowledge infrastructures and the inscrutability of openness in education. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3), pp. 251-264.

Hodgkinson-Williams, C. A., & Trotter, H. (2018). A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), 204-224

Teaching with video clips / Femke Morrison / An introduction to digital environments for learning (2020/2021)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0