The Challenge
The skills shortage, wherein there aren’t enough qualified graduates to meet industry needs, continues to be an urgent issue for governments, businesses and academics across the globe.
The medical profession faces particular challenges in ensuring students are able to keep pace with complex and fast-moving curricula. Outside the classroom, the rapid pace of change in medical practice and health policy means that medical professionals need to receive continual development and training on the job. And globally, one size doesn’t fit all.
Irish education company iheed was founded in 2010 by doctors and healthcare professionals to address the unprecedented need of governments, healthcare providers and individual practitioners for greater access to high-quality, accredited, postgraduate education in primary healthcare. To meet training requirements for specific clinical skills and professional development, iheed’s courses are delivered to medical postgraduate
students in the Gulf states, through a cost-effective and convenient online learning model.
“We launched iheed in response to a major gap in available medical education solutions,” said Peter Doyle, Chief Operations Officer at iheed. “The problem, while particularly acute in large parts of subSaharan Africa, is universal. We set out to reimagine and transform the delivery of medical education.”
Six years since their launch, iheed’s courses are now used by more than 25,000 healthcare professionals and students. To allow the solutions to perform on this scale, and to continue delivering compelling, content-rich and interactive courses, iheed needed to employ state-of-theart technology, use best-in-class resources and adopt a collaborative approach to product development.
“Our challenge is vast, we’re delivering courses to multiple institutions, in diverse geographies, and we’re growing all the time.”
Traditional VLEs are restrictive and closed. But Canvas, as an open source product, allows us to build solutions we want in the way we want. Canvas is at the very heart of what we do - but it’s not all of what we do. It’s the enabler, the catalyst that allows our great people to deliver great courses. Importantly, it helps us meet our overarching vision, to democratise healthcare education and open up the very best teaching to talented people, regardless of where they are in the world.”
Peter Doyle
Chief Operations Officer at iheed
The Solutions
“Today at iheed, we remain true to our original vision as we build out innovative solutions for our partners and customers,” said Peter Doyle. “But we don’t tackle this challenge alone. The cornerstone of our product is a hardworking virtual learning environment which delivers content in an interprofessional, collaborative manner. Using a VLE, we’re able to deliver and develop programmes for diverse and quickly changing training requirements. Teachers, employers and students can access materials and learn at a time and in a way that suits them.
“When choosing a VLE, we conducted a competitive pitch,” Doyle continued. “Canvas, when measured against the other leading online learning tools, stood out as the most compelling solution for our needs.”
Key Findings
Canvas is an easy-to-implement hardworking learning platform.
Canvas can scale with and support iheed as they deliver courses to thousands of insitutions.
As an open-source LMS, Canvas allows iheed to build solutions they want in the way they want.
Canvas supports presentation of content in the engaging manner they seek.
The Results
“It was absolutely vital that we could get up and running immediately, and the time from selection to implementation was very quick. The support team at Instructure must be commended for their ability to help us install the system very easily and with few teething problems,” said Doyle.
“The interface itself is intuitive and user friendly. And, most importantly of all, it works hard. In terms of data-driven education, Canvas provides everything we need in one place-assessments, grading, standards tracking and messaging can all be taken care of using this tool.”
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