Collaborative Peer-peer project, an attemt to improve biomedical students skills in knowledge aqcusition collaboration and project management

Background
A new curriculum for the biomedical laboratory scientist (BLS) education in Næstved gave way for implementing a peer-to-peer project-collaboration between students across semesters, where students, clinical and institutional teachers participate. The project encompasses a biomedical topic, which provides an insight and understanding of the patient´s path through the healthcare system from a theoretical and clinical viewpoint. The purpose was to create a shared confident learning environment, where students and teachers can co-create knowledge in respect to the biomedical topic.
Methods
To create this shared confident learning environment, we were inspired by literature on cooperative learning and peer-to-peer. We focused on the zone of proximal development by Vygotskij for the cooperative approach. A peer-to-peer strategy can empower both students and teachers to further learning from each other instead of learning alongside one another. In this project, the roles of student and teachers were suspended, transforming the teaching role to an inspiratory and motivator role. The student role would change to decision-making, organizing, planning, working collaboratively, giving and receiving feedback.
We designed the peer-to-peer project in 3 iterations, where the first iteration was implemented in spring 2017. The project progressed for a 2-week period; the projects could be literature reviews, patient interviews or laboratory experiments. At the end of the 2 weeks period, the students made an oral presentation of their finding for their peers. Based on the experiences from the first iteration, adjustments was made to the second iteration, the third iteration was adjusted with experiences from both iterations and completed in spring 2019.
Results
After the 3 iterations we evaluated the peer-to-peer project with students and clinical teachers, both feeling positive about the peer-to-peer project. Furthermore, the students report an improved social involvement in the class as well as improved presentation-skills. Most teachers were positive, but some requested an increased commitment among the students and state that the projects lacked focus on the BLS profession angle.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we will continue working with the design and structure of the project framework and providing the students with more cooperative learning tools.