The Birley Place team are an interprofessional group of academics, service users, professional services staff and students that developed the digital learning community that sits within Manchester Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Health and Education. The team consists of E-Learning Developers, Practice Facilitators, Students Partners, Lecturers/Senior Lecturers and senior members of faculty staff such as Head of International, a Director of Work-based Learning and Faculty Lead for Interprofessional Education. Birley Place is an online platform, hosted via WordPress, providing interprofessional learning resources and opportunities to Manchester Met students and external partners across the higher education sector, both nationally and internationally.
The platform provides virtual placements alongside learning resources such as vignettes, case studies, videos and more, to allow healthcare-related students and professionals to explore interactive scenarios in an authentic virtual space. The CATE Claim document details a collaborative practice rooted in core principles of inclusion and embracing diversity. One example of this is the way in which Birley Place works in partnership with advocacy groups such as the Manchester LGBT Foundation, a charitable organisation which worked with the team to ensure our simulated learning resources were LGBT-informed. This work also resulted in us collaboratively developing a framework for writing LGBT-informed and LGBT-representative simulation-based education, which has then been shared widely across the institution. Other such examples are discussed in the claim document.
Central to the ethos of the team is a genuine and meaningful collaboration with students as equal partners, shown here by three of our core project team being students. The online space that Birley Place occupies afforded the team the chance to bring wider student voices into the expertise within Birley Places learning resources themselves, through short films and input on designs. This work has enriched the project team and ensured that educational resources are authentic and grounded in the lived reality of student experience. Students in healthcare-related professions often feel concern about their ability to fit in on campus and in clinical settings. The virtual placement community and learning resources, co-designed with students, have helped to allay these concerns across multiple academic years and thousands of students.