Surgical Trainee Opinions in the United Kingdom Regarding a Three-Dimensional Virtual Mentoring Environment (MentorSL) in Second Life: Pilot Study

Medical mentoring is becoming increasingly complex with the evolving needs of trainees and the complexities of their personal and social lives. The Internet is an enabling technology, which increasingly facilitates interaction with multiple people at a distance. Web 2.0 and 3.0 technology shows prom...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:JMIR serious games 2013-09, Vol.1 (1), p.e2-e2
Main Authors: Jaffer, Usman, John, Nigel W, Standfield, Nigel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial intelligence
Augmented reality
Internet
Mentors
Original Paper
Questionnaires
Semantic web
Semantics
Statistical analysis
Surgery
Virtual communities
World Wide Web
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Summary:Medical mentoring is becoming increasingly complex with the evolving needs of trainees and the complexities of their personal and social lives. The Internet is an enabling technology, which increasingly facilitates interaction with multiple people at a distance. Web 2.0 and 3.0 technology shows promise in furthering this facilitation. The objective of our study was to establish opinions among doctors in postgraduate surgical training regarding mentoring and whether these doctors would readily accept virtual mentoring following a brief experience. On the 12th of February 2012, an introductory teaching class was arranged by The London Postgraduate School of Surgery for doctors in training. Participants were introduced to a novel virtual mentoring system and asked to complete a questionnaire regarding their opinions before and after the demonstration. A total of 57 junior doctors attended. Among them, 35 completed questionnaires pre- and postdemonstration. Regarding usefulness of a 3D virtual environment for mentoring, 6/35 (17%) agreed or strongly agreed and 20/35 (57%) were unsure prior to the session. Following 20 minutes using MentorSL, this significantly increased to 14/35 (40%) agreeing or strongly agreeing with 11/35 (31%) unsure (P
ISSN:2291-9279
2291-9279
DOI:10.2196/games.2822