Abstract:
Creative Waves: Visualising Issues in Pharmacy (VIP) was a global online project run over 14 weeks during 2007. The project linked over 200 students, educators, mentors and community representatives in a completely online learning environment addressing health promotion. Uniquely, the VIP project brought together the two disciplines of pharmacy and graphic design to collaborate in identifying, researching and designing public health campaigns to tackle significant health issues affecting the people living in the remote Kenyan village of Winam. In this chapter we describe the VIP project itself, the Omnium® Software technical platform that facilitated the online collaborations as well as quantitative and qualitative data describing the student experiences and engagement in the project. Many of the lessons learnt during the VIP project are illustrations of the literature surrounding online learning environments; we provide a summary of the key findings from VIP to benefit developers of future online collaborations.
