Instructional design of a Web-enhanced educational program for teaching the practice of pharmaceutical care.

摘要

The two objectives of this thesis were to develop the instructional design of a new, web-enhanced educational program to teach the fundamental principles of pharmaceutical care practice and to investigate the extent to which this program is effective.; The instructional design of this educational program applied principles of problem-based learning (PBL) because research suggests that PBL might be most effective in achieving the major objective of preparing students for the realities of professional practice.; For the first objective, an instructional systems design (ISD) approach was chosen to develop the instructional design for the web-enhanced educational tool for teaching the practice of pharmaceutical care.; An expertise-oriented evaluation was conducted as part of the development of the instructional design aimed at the usability of the software and its content to achieve the second objective. This method used in the evaluation of the instructional design was an inspection method similar in style to the heuristic method for usability testing described for the evaluation of computer interfaces. The principles (or heuristics) were listed in a questionnaire format and were based on related research identified by a review of the professional literature.; As a result of this study, a practical tool for teaching the practice of pharmaceutical care was developed along with an outline of design principles and recommendations for the instructional design of web-enhanced educational programs in the health sciences. In addition, the appropriateness of PBL principles and the usefulness of the heuristic method for the evaluation of educational programs in the health sciences were studied.