A massive open online course for teaching physiotherapy students and physiotherapists about spinal cord injuries

Postgraduate Online Teaching in Healthcare: An Analysis of Student Perspectives

“…Most notably, students expressed a desire to have a practical teaching session. This finding highlights the limitation of online learning in the area of clinical exercise and has been previously expressed by students studying anatomy and physiotherapy-specific courses online (Harvey et al, 2014;Swinnerton et al, 2016). Previous research has shown no difference in the course results of students who engage with course material online compared to those who engage in the traditional face-to-face method (Bello et al, 2005;Cook & Steinert, 2013;Edrich et al, 2016;Matzie, 2010;Pourmand et al, 2013).…”

Massive open online courses for nurses’ and healthcare professionals’ continuous education: a scoping review

“…Storytelling in educational materials enhanced emotional involvement in the course (Zubala et al 2019 (Sitzman et al 2016) (e)punctual follow-up (Magaña-Valladares et al 2018b) The effectiveness and quality of MOOCs is prevented when: -learners feel social isolation (Gitlin & Hodgson 2016) when they use the online resource alone (Harvey et al 2017) -no social support or guidance is offered (Harvey et al 2017), support is poor (Hoedebecke et al 2018) or resources to allow engagement/discussion are poor or not provided (Stark & Pope 2014) -there is limited teacher À learner engagement (Gitlin & Hodgson 2016), lack of experts to develop and supervise courses (Setia et al 2019), lack of instructions from teachers offline (Jia et al 2019) or lack of instructor interaction (Hoedebecke et al 2018;Medina-Presentado et al 2017) -Facebook group has too many comments to read (Harvey et al 2014) -there are language barriers (Scott et al 2019), such as when the course is provided only in one language (e.g. English; Setia et al 2019;Sneddon et al 2018) for a global audience (Fricton et al 2015) and requires high language comprehension (Hoedebecke et al 2018) -limited consideration has been paid to time issues: (a)high time required each week to complete all tasks (Harvey et al 2014) or when MOOC is too long (Jia et al 2019) (b)lack of time (Hoedebecke et al 2018;Medina-Presentado et al 2017) among full-time employers (Warugaba et al 2016) with competing demands due to work duties (Scott et al 2019) Table 1 Continued…”

“…(f)regular communications to boost engagement, although most can also be system generated or automated (Setia et al 2019) (g)ensuring ongoing commitment from all educators to ensure that learners are supported during each week (Sneddon et al 2018) -Creating a powerful international dialogue and learning community (Gitlin & Hodgson 2016) providing opportunities to engage with colleagues around the world (Harvey et al 2017): (a)translate content into more languages (Bendezu-Quispe et al 2017) (b)overcome language barriers by providing parallel social media interactions (Hoedebecke et al 2018) (c)provide videos with English subtitles to resolve language barriers (Warugaba et al 2016) -Ensuring that the time required is short (Goldberg & Crocombe 2017;Setia et al 2019;Subhi et al 2014) or adequate (Harvey et al 2017) -Supporting effective time management strategies such as study plans, assigning time estimates and providing tools to support learners who are less skilled in time management (Milligan & Littlejohn 2016) -Setting a time frame and sending reminders for completion (Stark & Pope 2014) IMPLEMENTATION Some factors have been underlined as facilitating implementation, such as: -ensuring political will and commitment (Magaña-Valladares et al 2018b) and high institutional support (Evans et al 2017), such as Ministry of Health promotion/support (Scott et al 2019) -engaging employers to allow employees to use work hours for classes (Warugaba et al 2016) -offering regular and frequent communication from medical societies with their members on available learning modules, feedback and preference surveys and knowledge assessment results (Setia et al 2019) -providing advertisements for the course through multiple credible channels (Setia et al 2019) and appointing facilitators at the district hospital level (Scott et al 2019) -guaranteeing long-term financial sustainability with a sponsor that will commit for a defined period (Setia et al 2019) -proving low-cost solutions (e.g. by using low technology methods as Word and PDF documents; Sneddon et al 2018) -ensuring course accreditation (Harvey et al 2014;Setia et al 2019) by relevant professional bodies…”

“…The wide implementation of MOOCs has been reported to be facilitated by the support offered at political (Magaña-Valladares et al 2018b), ministerial (Scott et al 2019) and/or institutional (Warugaba et al 2016) levels. Moreover, the accreditation of MOOCs (Harvey et al 2014;Setia et al 2019) by professional bodies (Sneddon et al 2018) or rewards with a recognized qualification (Fricton et al 2015;Sneddon et al 2018) have also been documented as increasing both the course's popularity and effectiveness. Some factors influencing the MOOC's effectiveness have also been reported at the learner's level; degree of motivation and desire to learn (Pickering & Swinnerton 2017), and the perception of doing something useful (Warugaba et al 2016) or of being supported by the work environment (Zubala et al 2019)…”

“…According to the findings, the first study included on MOOCs was published in 2014 (Harvey et al 2014). In the subsequent six years, 26 studies have been published, suggesting that MOOCs represent a new field of research interest, mainly with exploratory study designs (Subhi et al 2014).…”