Abstract:

The rapid advancement of technology today has led to many education institutions redesigning and realigning curriculum to accommodate the needs of today’s generation of learners. There is growing evidence that e-learning has been very impactful in today’s educational landscape, and becoming a major platform for delivering learning content, opening up many possibilities for other sectors to become involved in. The use of ICT and the web is also very prevalent in Malaysian and Korean educational institutions, with the introduction of the Malaysia Education Blueprint Higher Education 2015-2025 and the South Korean Government’s “Law for Developing On-Line Digital Contents Industry” initiatives to drive the use of technology-supported learning. However, there are still areas in education that warrant development and implementation of technology, a deeper understanding of the quality of such delivery of content, and proper design guidelines for such e-learning development. One such area is the design and development of health rooms in schools in South Korea, where an e-learning module can be designed, accessed and viewed on the Web 24/7, thus providing parents with knowledge of the state and conditions of the health rooms and their facilities in their childrens’ schools, and in other school in the surrounding area, without having to be physically present.

Therefore, this research study was undertaken as a joint collaboration project between the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University, Malaysia and the Design Institute, Inje University, South Korea, to investigate learner’s attitudes towards an e-learning application on health rooms in schools. Students from both Korean and Malaysian universities participated in this study, with 67 undergraduates students from Inje University and 66 students from Multimedia University, totaling 133 participants. The learning application was designed and underpinned by the Principles of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2001) as the theoretical framework, and developed in both Korean and English languages, using 10 schools in Busan City, South Korea, selected under the Health Room Modernization Service, which was an initiative by the South Korean Government to design attractive health rooms, based on color, furniture, location, etc. A mixed method research design was used and data collected were triangulated to provide results for this study. Both Korean and Malaysian students were presented with the e-learning module which was uploaded onto the web and accessible 24/7.

A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire was administered to ascertain their perceptions on the following factors:
1) The content of the application,
2) The attractiveness of the module and
3) The ease of navigation and interactivity.

They were also asked several open-ended questions to get their feedback and comments on the application. Results showed that Korean students found the e-learning module of the health rooms to be useful for Korean parents to have knowledge of the actual environment of these health rooms, consequently promoting parental confidence in the school’s health facility, while Malaysian students found the module to be a good reference for similar content for Malaysian schools. A learning framework is presented as a guideline for educators who are seeking to redesign and realign their learning environment and content with interactive e-learning ecosystems for enhanced learning experiences.

Keywords:

Health rooms, e-learning, Korea, Malaysia, Mayer, healthcare.