CHALLENGES OF SAFETY – AND CRISIS MANAGMENET TRAINING DURING COVID19

Simulation based training is a common way of training for effective learning for high-risk contexts. COVID19 changed large parts of the education and training of safety- and risk management at Nord University in Norway. The training and education have been based on theoretical lectures prior to simulated practical exercises at the university’s emergency preparedness laboratory, NORDLAB. Here, academic staff, mentors, facilitators, and the students cooperated prior to, during and after exercises in order to provide an optimal learning context. However, this cooperation required close contact which suddenly ended when COVID19 hit, due to infection control. This resulted in challenges including how to uphold the learning outcome for based on the theoretical foundation of Kolb’s (2014) experiential learning, which is the foundation NORDLAB is based on, while changing the form of training on a short notice. The learning context was changed to net-based training and exercises using the software zoom, with all participants geographically spread all over Norway. Thus, our research question was: Which challenges in use of simulation and lab exercises in safety management education during COVID19 are central, and how could they be solved? The challenges identified were 1) student’s lack of ability to actively participate 2) mentors’ lack of technological flexibility 3) inability to share the lab’s simulation technology with zoom 4) novice students difficulties of forming and interacting in digital teams 5) zoom fatigue 6) the need for increased administrative and technological support 7) low body language feedback 8) lack of visualization of injects. Solving the challenges were defiant and elements we used in this case were 1) on-boarding 2) table top exercises 3) video recorded lectures 4) flipped classroom 5) gaming simulated exercises 6) podcasts 7) shorter training sessions We would like to discuss how and if the solutions matched the challenges for safety training in regard to the expected learning outcome for students who were to enter practical emergency preparedness and safety management.