Analytics meet patient manikins: challenges in an authentic small-group healthcare simulation classroom

Healthcare simulations are hands-on learning experiences aimed at allowing students to practice essential skills that they may need when working with real patients in clinical workplaces. Some clinical classrooms are equipped with patient manikins that can respond to actions or that can be programmed to deteriorate over time. Students can perform assessments and interventions, and enhance their critical thinking and communication skills. There is an opportunity to exploit the students' digital traces that these manikins can pervasively capture to make key aspects of the learning process visible. The setting can be augmented with sensors to capture traces of group interaction. These multimodal data can be used to generate visualisations or feedback for students or teachers. This paper reports on an authentic classroom study using analytics to integrate multimodal data of students' interactions with the manikins and their peers in simulation scenarios. We report on the challenges encountered in deploying such analytics 'in the wild', using an analysis framework that considers the social, epistemic and physical dimensions of collocated group activity.