Scaling-up Undergraduate Medical Education: Enabling Virtual Mobility by Online Elective Courses

摘要

Aim To evaluate online elective courses at Croatian medical schools withrespect to the virtual mobility of national teachers and students and virtualteam collaboration.Methods A student-centered virtual learning environment developedwithin the framework of the European Union Tempus Programme allowednational educational services to design and deliver online undergraduateelective courses. Three online elective courses were created forsecond-year medical students of four Croatian medical schools by usingMoodle, an open-source learning management system. The coursessupported problem-, project-, and decision-based learning and requiredstudents to work in small collaborative teams using problem-solving anddecision-making activities. The purpose was to foster teamwork and producebetter outcomes than those potentially achieved through individualwork. We evaluated the results of these online courses on the basis of thecourse test results and students’ evaluation questionnaires.Results Of 68 students enrolled in all e-courses, 97% (n = 66) successfullypassed the final exam. An anonymous online questionnaire wasfilled out by 83% (n = 50) of the students. The majority expressed theirsatisfaction with the online electives, mostly because they had more contactwith tutors and peers (n = 47), better possibilities of self-assessment(n = 38), more flexible learning (n = 33), better access to learning materials(n = 32), faster and easier information retrieval (n = 31), and betterquality of communication with tutors and peers (n = 28). Although 38 of50 students claimed that participating in e-courses was more demandingthan participating in traditional electives, more than half (n = 27) wouldenroll in an e-course again.Conclusion Elective e-courses may be a successful model of how facultyand students at higher education institutions can collaborate and integratee-learning into their current curricula