Abstract:

In 2009 City University’s education development team was invited to design an open educational resource for healthcare workers caring for people affected by Tuberculosis (TB) in developing countries. The proposal came from the International Council for Nurses (ICN), who had gained funding from the sponsor Ely Lilly, to make the training for standards in TB care available online. The rationale was to extend the existing face-to-face training provided by one ICN nurse consultant visiting different countries by an online learning resource for TB carers and professionals in developing countries.

Our initial search for online learning resources in the development field showed that most training manuals and online material were in the form of documents with instructions on how to carry out tasks in care setting, with minimal interactivity. These manuals did not take account of local context and availabilty of resources. Our aim was to exploit the online technologies and create an interactive resource that would help empower the users and enable learning relevant for their own context.

We have now developed the Interactive e-learning course on the "Care, prevention and management of tuberculosis" which is available online under Creative Commons. In this paper we share the design process and hurdles we as academics, media developers and learning technologists faced when designing this resource to meet the learning needs of professionals and carers situated in very different cultural and healthcare settings. The paper describes our learning, as we attempted to overcome these challenges. Our recommendations may be beneficial for design teams who may need to engage in similar projects in the future.

Keywords:

Development education, healthcare education, learning design, e-learning.