Incorporating interprofessional collaboration competencies into both undergraduate pre-licensure and graduate health science students poses challenges for academic health science centers. Certain student groups may have less opportunity to participate in interprofessional learning experiences due to demands of individual programs of study and conflicts in scheduling time with other disciplines. A group of interprofessional higher education faculty members created an innovative online asynchronous interprofessional experience with the primary goals of meeting accreditation standards for specific programs and providing interprofessional education (IPE) to students who were unable to participate in traditional face-to-face IPE experiences already established at the institution. This guide will highlight the process of design and development of the learning opportunity, from conception to implementation. The pilot of the asynchronous online IPE experience served as a model for the transition of the original in-person model to virtual IPE during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even before the spread of COVID-19 video conferencing software has seen a steady rise in use. Due to their convenient way of offering a way of seeing the other participants live while talking to them, it is quite easy to see why this kind of software became more and more used throughout the years. Now, during the pandemic, video conferencing software is more used than ever before, especially in learning environments. Nevertheless, studies show that student engagement is rather low with university students who take part in online learning. Throughout this paper, we venture into discovering the reasons behind this lack of engagement and how it can be improved from a User Experience Design standpoint. With findings resulted from several previous studies and identified student problems and needs from those papers we created a prototype to test which features and design elements affected student engagement.