TECHNOLOGICAL PORTABILITY IN HEALTH POSTGRADUATE COURSES: THE USE OF EDUCATIONAL APPLICATION IN MULTIDISCIPLINAR NEPHROLOGY

The development and improvement of new technologies have increasingly contributed to the expansion of Distance Education (DE). In Brazil, DE has been turning into a solution to reach more and more people in the most difficult and distant areas, bringing them to continuing education. Brazilian government has observed the advantages presented by DE and, because of the flexibility and the interactivity that the modality provides to teaching-learning process, created the Open University of Brazilian National Health System (UNA-SUS). The institution aims to deliver continuing medical education in DE modality to health professionals linked to public health care network in the country. In order to offer high quality contents and to make them accessible all the time to its students UNA-SUS, with the support of the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA), has been developing open applications to mobile devices in which the content of the courses are made available to students anytime, anywhere and in any kind of device used by the students to study. This paper aims to present the development process of one of these applications, created and applied within the Specialization Course in Nephrology - offered by UNASUS to the health professionals in the state of Maranhao – Brazil. The educational resource consists of a responsive online book, whose interface design was based upon the Theory of Multimedia Learning and standards developed for Responsive Web Design. The material is also available in offline mode and can be accessed without internet access as long as the application is downloaded. This feature was developed to facilitate access for professionals who are in remote areas and often isolated from direct contact to the web. In this perspective, it is described here an educational resource that transgresses the barriers of distance and, through the support of technology, helps build the continuous training of various health professionals in the state of Maranhão, Brazil.