Getting the Right Mix

A Risk-Based Approach to Blended Learning Design for Healthcare Workplace Training

Abstract

Ensuring employees are competent and confident to perform their duties relies on new employee orientation and ongoing compliance training. Currently, there is no industry standard or evidence-informed decision framework that determines when to use face-to-face, online, or blended learning for healthcare workplace training. This mixed methods research investigated how instructional designers use blended learning to balance the ethical, patient safety, resource, and budget demands inherent in an ever-changing and high-tech workplace, to answer the question: Is there a relationship between delivery modes, interaction type, and perceived risk of the content to be learned in healthcare workplace training? An anonymous online survey asked the opinions of healthcare workplace instructional designers (N = 26) about the use of interaction type and delivery mode for workplace training. The opinions of a subset of participants (n = 19) were analyzed for correlation between their preference for delivery modalities and interaction types in relation to their perceived risk of the content to be learned. Quantitative analysis found: (a) preference for in-person/face-to-face delivery via learner-instructor interaction, specifically for high-risk learning content, (b) less preference for blended learning delivery, and (c) no preference for synchronous online delivery. This study proposes a risk-based instructional design decision-making tool for the healthcare workplace.