Abstract:

Competencies in public health are essential for health professionals, and permanent learning is one of the most used strategies to meet this challenge. Much of the effort to achieve learning is operated through training and it is necessary to use innovative educational tools such as ICT mediated education.

On the global, regional and national agenda, the need for training health professionals is reiterated as mentioned in the Sustainable Development Goals, the Essential Public Health Functions of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Mexican Health Sector Program.

The School of Public Health of Mexico (ESPM in Spanish), is currently part of the National Institute of Public Health (INSP in Spanish). It has contributed for 92 years in the education, updating and training of health professionals in Mexico, but it was until 2005, when the school carried out an educational reform by incorporating ICTs in the creation of virtual learning environments for its academic programs, setting precedents in new teaching-learning models for health professionals. The new educational model was developed under a competency-based educational approach, incorporating ICTs. In 2013 the school produced its first MOOC, and trained more than 500,000 health professionals since then.

Currently, there are different initiatives in the country and the region that offer online mass training for health professionals through MOOCs. It is worth mentioning the Public Health Virtual Campus of the Pan American Health Organization, whose courses are presented on the Moodle platform. It is also important to bring up the Mexico X project, which is not properly a health platform, but it hosts some health courses on the openEDX platform, and INSP itself , that since 2013 has produced MOOCs without a specific platform, but in 2017 created its own platform to host health courses.

The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platform — CLiMA in Spanish, alluding to climate, environment, in this case a learning environment—, was created by the INSP' Technology and Educational Innovation Department, and decided NOT to limit the instructional design to what was already offered by the different existing educational platforms, but to make its own platform with enough flexibility to offer different personalities to each of the MOOCs launched, following the standards of the "big data" worldwide.

The MOOC platform became available on May 26th, 2017 and in just two months from then it already has 14 courses with 11911 enrolled participants, 4476 approved students and a perception average of 9.7/10 in all courses. The courses range from social determinants of health, AEDES mosquito control, and diabetes to teen pregnancy prevention.

Currently, 5 of the 14 MOOC courses are part of research protocols that aim to evaluate health impact through these courses. Each course is designed under a competency-based educational model and then designed according to its own needs. However, some of the educational strategies that have worked the best are gamification, case resolution and scenario building among others.

The MOOC platform is the beginning of a massive strategy of knowledge in health at the regional level, and without a doubt, a viable, free and motivating option for the development of competencies for health professionals.

Keywords:

MOOC, Health, Mexico, LMS.