'Will free open social learning enhance or hinder the effectiveness of ECG (electrocardiography) analysis learning?'
Presenter: Aléchia van Wyk (School of Science & Technology)
An investigation of learning and teaching effectiveness between two groups of healthcare science students used innovative pedagogy methods (social media) and class- or work-based learning to better understand the role e-learning (social media) plays in knowledge transfer for medical education.
Outline: Technological and social changes taking place in recent years are affecting the way we are presenting and transferring knowledge in healthcare education and a certain shift in emphasis on learning, rather than teaching has been noticed, as we rightly move towards a learner-centred curriculum, more specifically e-learning modules. In the field of healthcare the life of knowledge is shorter than ever and causes increasing pressure to remain at the forefront of medical education throughout a health professionals’ career. Therefore, whilst discussing implementation of e-learning in healthcare education at undergraduate level, models consisting of blended learning (combination of a mix of on-line and face-to-face training) should be encouraged, because the biggest disadvantage of e-learning is that students have to learn on their own without any interaction and in healthcare education interpersonal contact cannot be omitted by building a virtual environment, as it is a crucial factor in training future practitioners. The proposed project will investigate the effectiveness of a four week blended learning (30%) and ten week social-media networking model (70%) as a method of learning how to interpret electrocardiograms (ECG) on the BSc Healthcare Science (Cardiac Physiology) program in year 1. This approach will allow us to better meet the academic needs of our students, whilst addressing a number of key challenges, which include inconsistent clinical exposure to patients whose presenting problems vary by site and inconsistent training and quality of clinical preceptors at each of the clinical sites. Thus, providing the present day net-generation healthcare science students with options to access and share information more readily and also set the stage for possible collaboration between teachers and students from different universities, allowing exchange of knowledge and experiences and the impact of these interventions can be beneficial to students in the development of graduate attributes.
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Keywords: Innovation, e-learning, health care, ECG, PuLSE
