In order to maximize competitiveness, the United States must create sustainable education pathways to develop workforce readiness through life-long education and training using innovative educational technologies. This project leverages a unique collaboration between Richardson Independent School District (RISD) and the Methodist Richardson Medical Center (MRMC) to enable students to graduate from high school with entry-level medical certifications in fields such as Pharmacy Tech, EKG Technician or Clinical Medical Assistant and start working immediately after high school. However, a key component to readiness for these workers is social emotional intelligence (SEI) or the ability to successfully handle patient/family/caregiver situations; develop cultural empathy; and strengthen professional stamina. Skills in these areas will help these workers gain employment and stay employed. In order to get this real-life experience, students traditionally do clinical rotations in medical settings. However, clinical experiences are limited, not all students can participate, and students sometimes do not get enough hospital experience to develop SEI. Through this planning grant, the project team will design a platform to provide education that will expand on the clinical educational opportunities available to students with complementary networked and collaborative virtual experiences designed to fill SEI educational gaps and facilitate student learning through both high school faculty and hospital staff.

In this planning grant, an established group of experts in both healthcare curriculum and learning science methodology will confirm the required SEI skills necessary for the students to develop and explore the immersive media that will best be able to provide these experiences, while heavily considering the social learning or group and observational educational opportunities between faculty, students and hospital staff. From a technology perspective, the project planning team will explore using educational video game environments, virtual humans, and similar collaborative mixed reality over high speed networks such as the Richardson US Ignite Smart Gigabit Community. This project will define mixed reality as the appropriate balance of advanced digital technology emphasizing augmented and virtual reality. The project will also design the metrics for determining the platform’s viability and usability. A potential approach is design-based research, which provides a basis for cross-disciplinary work. This iterative research approach will integrate key community stakeholders such as students, teachers and working professionals; learning context, e.g. hospital culture; and integration of these factors with technology research. This research will contribute to new types of learning paradigms that are dynamic, immersive, engaging and distributable– thus enabling a unique type of educational platform for sustaining critical STEM educational pathways.