Developing a Public Online Learning Environment for Crisis Awareness, Preparation, and Response

Introduction

For the past ten years the lead authors have been involved in a research agenda encompassing the provision of, and support for, training for all stakeholders involved in crisis management. Predominantly, our wish is to make well-formed and easily accessible training materials available at relatively low cost, to improve the quality of public and professional response in crisis situations. To enable this work, the authors have been involved in a number of publicly funded research projects related to this research agenda, and this paper brings together outputs from three of those projects in the design and development of an online vehicle and training materials to help develop population awareness. Chronologically, the three projects are, the Pandora project, the dCCDFLITE project, both of which are described later in the paper, and finally the POP-ALERT project, which is the main focus of this work and is about to complete. POP-ALERT is an EU FP7 project involving eleven partners from seven countries across Europe. Its focus is the preparation of societies and populations to cope with crises and disasters in a rapid, effective and efficient way. The POP-ALERT team has undertaken a thorough review of the literature on approaches, population behaviours (including willingness to prepare), first reaction strategies, awareness of risk etc. The focus of this work is not only on local populations but also vulnerable groups, such as tourists, expatriates, the elderly and refugees, and the effectiveness of the use of messages, audible alarms, pictograms etc. on these population groups. The POP-ALERT project has generated a framework encompassing a variety of tools and techniques to enhance population awareness, realised as an online dashboard, and concluded with local and distributed field studies to test the effectiveness of this framework.

To support the field studies in POP-ALERT, the authors utilised a bespoke version of Pandora⁺ (¹Bacon et al., 2015), which is the enhanced development of a product called Pandora (Bacon et al., 2012; MacKinnon et al., 2013), one of the key outputs from an EU FP7 project, which ran between Jan 2010 and March 2012. Pandora⁺ is an immersive, rich multimedia, training environment initially designed to provide realistic training for strategic level crisis managers, who, in the event of a crisis, need to work together to come up with a plan of action and take decisions as the crisis situation unfolds. The Pandora⁺ system is not however specific to crisis management, it is a sophisticated environment into which a wide variety of scenarios from any domain can be uploaded and executed. It has an event network approach, which presents trainees with a series of events that occur within a specified timeline and requires them to make decisions about what to do at specific points on that timeline. The timeline then has the capacity to branch the scenario depending on the answer provided by the trainee(s). An example of a different domain could be a trainee’s analysis of the rise and fall of the stock market in relation to specific events, and making decisions about stocks and shares to purchase / sell etc.

The Pandora⁺ environment was utilised in a field study in POP-ALERT that was used to train members of the general public in Lisbon in February 2016. The scenario focused on an earthquake as an example of a natural disaster. One purpose of the trial was to test the use of Pandora⁺ and the POP-ALERT dashboard on a small sample of the population as a pilot, before running it as a self-study massive open online course (MOOC) (²Bacon et al., 2015), with members of the general public able to register and follow the training course at a time suitable to them and for a duration of their choosing.