Abstract:

By world standards Australia has a very good healthcare system. It guarantees the vast majority of people residing in Australia have access to comprehensive healthcare of a high standard. The equity of access to the system is funded and maintained primarily through general taxation revenue. But the cost of maintaining the system constantly increases. During the 1999 reporting period, the percentage of Australia’s GDP required to fund the healthcare system was 5.4 per cent; by 2010 it was 8.7 per cent.

Critical to sustaining Australia’s healthcare system are the appropriately experienced, educated and qualified personnel who deliver and manage the services. The demand for healthcare personnel in the system is met by the high standard of healthcare-specific and relevant non-specific, certificate, diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate courses offered by various educational establishments. At the service provider level it is the responsibility of the provider to monitor and ensure currency and competency of practice; whether this is a single private practitioner or a large publicly funded hospital.

Bendigo Health (BH) is one of the largest regional health care providers in Victoria, Australia, employing 3,500 staff. BH has implemented an online learning platform to house its digital modules, most of which have been produced internally. BH’s collaborative health and research centre (CHERC) has a team of multimedia and instructional designers that are available to assist clinicians and corporate managers to transform basic content into interactive, digital modules comprising a range of multimedia components. The team has recognized that the process to produce digital education and training modules could be so much more effective and efficient if health educators and managers were able to identify the specific resources required to progress basic content into a format designed for digital viewing.

Health educators are highly qualified and skilled in their field of knowledge and teaching, but rarely have the skills and knowledge necessary for the development of digital education programs. Converting a PowerPoint presentation for example, into a multimedia presentation that can be digitally reproduced, including file conversion, creating flash files, video-editing, motion graphics and audio files requires extensive skills and knowledge, beyond the capacity of most health professionals. Hence the impetus for the CHERC team to develop a digital interactive online module that will inform health educators and managers about the pre and post production processes necessary to deliver educational material capable of engaging the end-user.

The module will be accessible on a personal computer for the purpose of assisting health professionals to plan for the development of educational content into a digital format. While the module is being developed to meet a specific need in a regional Australian healthcare service, it could be used by any industry or individual that wants to develop online learning packages. The title of the proposed module is: Content to creation: A guide for managers and educators on how to develop content into interactive multimedia presentations. This presentation outlines the process to develop the module and the modules’ content will be presented.

Keywords:

e-learning, online learning, digital media, health educators, Australia.