Naslov
Scaling-up Undergraduate Medical Education: Enabling Virtual Mobility by Online Elective Courses

Autori
Kukolja-Taradi, Sunčana ; Đogaš, Zoran ; Dabić, Marina ; Drenjančević-Perić, Ines

Izvornik
Croatian medical journal (0353-9504) 49 (2008), 3; 344-351

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
medical education; e-learning; collaborative learning; virtual teams; virtual mobility

Sažetak
To scale-up the teaching offer of Croatian medical schools with high quality online elective courses by means of national teachers? and students? virtual mobility and virtual team collaboration. Within the framework of the EU Tempus Programme a rich student-centered virtual learning environment was developed to provide national educational services for designing and delivering undergraduate online elective courses. Three online elective courses were created for second year medical students of all four Croatian medical schools by using the open source learning management system Moodle. The courses supported problem-, project-, and decision-based learning and required students to work in small collaborative teams using problem solving and decision-making activities in order to create synergy for producing something beyond what anyone could have done sole. Out of 68 students enrolled in all e-courses, 97% (n = 66) successfully passed the final exam. An anonymous online questionnaire was filled out by 50 (83%) students. The majority expressed their satisfaction with online electives mostly because having more contacts with tutors and colleagues (n = 47 ; 94%), better possibilities of self-assessment (n = 38 ; 76%), more flexible learning (n = 33 ; 66%), better accessibility of learning materials (n = 32 ; 64%), faster and easier information retrieval (n = 31 ; 62%), and better quality of communication with tutors and peers (n = 28 ; 56%). Although 76% (n = 38) of students claim that participating in e-courses is more demanding than traditional electives, 54% of them (n = 27) would enroll in an e-course again. Elective e-courses may be a successful model of how faculty and students of higher education institutions can collaborate to integrate e-learning into their current curricula.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Temeljne medicinske znanosti, Ekonomija

POVEZANOST RADA