Abstract:

This paper presents the pedagogic underpinning for the development of an online postgraduate short course educating participants on Multi-Modal Data Science in Digital Health. The growing digital health sector in Scotland points to the importance of networking and teamwork components, which will be central to the professional development that should be facilitated within this short course. To that end, this paper will show how the literature has been used to inform the integration of aspects of constructivism (such as encouraging self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation) to improve participants' learning experience and their capability to apply learned skills in their practice.

A key candidate for this approach is inquiry-based learning, typically characterised by events such as hackathons. However, hackathons present challenges for online and postgraduate learners, including lack of physical location and barriers to time investment. We are therefore motivated to propose an adaptation that draws on theories and research related to inquiry-based learning and hackathons. In this paper we describe the inception of the resulting model and evaluate an initial design against a panel of experts in the field.

Keywords:

Computing education, inquiry-based learning, short course development, professional students.