Abstract:

Specialization courses play an important role in provision of complementary and specific knowledge to health professionals that are already engaged in a very active and time consuming professional life. For these professionals, learning activities are constrained by the reduced amount of available time, geographical location and a busy agenda. Making use of alternative teaching approaches that are flexible and adapted to each student profile, and are not bounded by the rigidity of traditional methods, is crucial to allow a self managed rhythm of learning and good engagement in the educational activities.

This paper describes the model, implementation and preliminary assessement of a distance and b-learning teaching model in two postgraduate courses at the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto (Medical School of Porto University).
These courses aim at providing updated and enhanced knowledge in several medical specialties to health professionals, who are already in their clinical activity and intending to enhance their professional practices. The lectures are focused on the subjects of Sports Medicine (SM) and Geriatrics (GE).

Students may attend the courses either in the classroom, Face-to-Face mode (FFM), or remotely, in Distance Mode (DM), through a video/audio conference system. Classes are recorded and made permanently available to every student through a Learning Management System. If students are not able to be present in class,they may use the recorded videos to replay and review each class. In that case, they are requested to make a short essay about the class content. For each course there is an e-tutor present that supports the teacher in the classroom and coordinates the participation of remote students.

We have developed an assessment quiz to evaluate the impact of this learning model. It was presented before and after the instruction period.
When comparing all students using initial and final assessment quizzes, we observe that students improved their outcomes.
When looking to FFM and DM groups’ progression in GE course, the DM group presented an increase in average grades when comparing the initial and final quizzes grades.

When looking to the progression of FFM and DM groups in SM course, both FFM and DM groups showed increase in average grades, when comparing the initial and final assessment quizzes grades.
There were no differences between FFM and DM students groups in final year average grades either in GE or SM course.
The increase in student’s average grades attained at the beginning and end of the courses quizzes reveals that there is a learning progress. FFM and DM student groups show similar increases in their outcomes, suggesting that remote attendance did not create extra obstacles to the learning process.

This is further supported by not finding significant differences between FFM and DM groups regarding final course average grades. A possible explanation for this lies in the fact that the learning model is robust and was mimicked over to the DM group seamlessly.

Keywords:

b-learning, distance learning, Medicine, teaching methods, sports medicine, geriatrics, video.