Active learning modules for multi-professional emergency management training in virtual reality

In modern society there is interest for safer industrial workplaces and a growing need for cost effective training of personnel in emergency management work. Use of live trials as training modules to model emergency situations and prepare for crisis events can be expensive, risky, inflexible to adapt to alternate scenarios, and difficult to replicate. Therefore, virtual reality simulations for education and training offer new opportunities and are being increasingly adopted for such purposes. Quite often emergency situations involve a multiprofessional team of medics, firefighters, police, and industry workers such as engineers who are working and co-located at the incident site. However, existing simulations for training typically focus on mono-professional teams, omitting the crucial communications and collaboration protocols from training modules. In this paper we discuss a project that has an objective to develop a new model for multi-professional Emergency Management education that involves use of virtual reality simulations. In particular, address the theoretical question of how combination of Activity theory and Naturalistic Decision Making/Recognition Primed Decision models can form the basis for a pedagogical model for multi-professional emergency management training. We present the design of the virtual reality simulation, learning scenarios and the results of the initial trials among various user groups. Finally, we identify the opportunities and challenges for applying virtual reality based learning environments for efficient and safe training.