Abstract:

Institutions of higher education currently offer training programs that use different educational modalities to meet the needs of students with various professional and personal demands. This paper analyzes three educational modalities—traditional (classroom-based, full-time), virtual (electronic learning), and multimodal (blended learning which combines classroom and online activities)—used to deliver the core courses of the Masters in Public Health from 2006-2009 at the Mexican National Institute of Public Health. The core courses use a pedagogic model based on competencies and include biostatistics, epidemiology, quantitative methods, and social sciences. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses of the student characteristics (education level, number of children, employment status, age, gender, source of funding for masters program) and grades for the courses delivered through each of the three educational modalities, this study aims to evaluate the profile of students that choose traditional, virtual, and multimodal programs and determine which modality is most effective in terms of academic performance. The results show that there is a different student profile for each educational modality. Students who participated in the traditional program were younger than 30 years old, had completed undergraduate studies in various fields, and received a scholarship to pay for tuition. In contrast, students who participated in the virtual program were 40 years old or older, held high level positions in health professions, received support from a health institution to pay for tuition, and most had medical backgrounds. Students who participated in the multimodal program were 30 to 40 years old, held mid-level positions in various health professions, and paid for their tuition. This difference between the profiles could be due to the work responsibilities of students, as managers and directors have less time to dedicate to studying and, therefore, prefer the virtual modality which allows them to study at their own pace. Students who participated in the multimodal program received the highest grades, suggesting that this modality is the most effective in terms of academic performance. This could be because students are able to complete online activities while benefiting from classroom-based interactions to which they are accustomed in the teaching-learning process. The main conclusions of this study are: 1) each modality attracted a different type of student; and 2) multimodal learning is the most effective in terms of academic performance for delivering courses that use a competency-based education model. The authors recommend that future research should investigate the relationship between the educational modality and model, as the conclusions of the present study suggest that the latter may be more important in terms of academic performance.

Keywords:

educational modality, electronic learning, blended learning, public health, higher education.