By Dr Malik Zaben; the Director of Health Sciences Education / IMET2000-Pal
The eLearning training course for doctors is another core course that is presented to all doctors in Palestine by our IMET2000-Pal’s eLearning trainer. In addition to teaching the searching of the web, trainees were educated how to apply internet searching strategies in their practice and for seeking updated knowledge.
This course is part of a comprehensive program that is designed to offer doctors control over content, learning sequence, pace of learning, time, and often media, allowing them to tailor their experiences to meet their personal learning objectives. In diverse medical education contexts, e-learning appears to be at least as effective as traditional instructor-led methods such as lectures. We do not see e-learning as replacing traditional instructor-led training but as a complement to it, forming part of a blended-learning strategy. A developing infrastructure to support e-learning within medical education in Palestine should include repositories, or digital libraries, to manage access to e-learning materials, consensus on technical standardization, and methods for peer review of these resources. E-learning presents numerous research opportunities for faculty, along with continuing challenges for documenting scholarship. Innovations in e-learning technologies point toward a revolution in education, allowing learning to be individualized (adaptive learning), enhancing learners' interactions with others (collaborative learning), and transforming the role of the educator. While we are hoping to implement a system of e-learning in Palestine, we believe that the integration of this modality into medical education can catalyze the shift toward applying adult learning theory, where educators will no longer serve mainly as the distributors of content, but will become more involved as facilitators of learning and assessors of competency.
Several teaching modalities are used to present the information. Currently this first course has 7 scheduled hours. Those hours are spent to cover some theory materials as well as some practical exercises on internet searching modalities and e-learning skills. Participants were granted a certificate of achievement upon the successful completion of the course post attendance assessment.
We have so far trained four groups of physicians from all over Palestine. Each group consisted of 10-15 doctors. Participants have found this training of great help in seeking knowledge and in getting up to date with the rapidly changing medical literature.
In summary, this course, which will continue to be delivered to as many doctors as need it, is intended to improve the internet searching strategies to help them establish a self-built continuing education process. Ambition is subject to available funding.
