Being an E-learner in Health and Social Care

A Student's Guide

Julie Santy, Liz Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134144587
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

E-learning is a new, exciting and increasingly popular way of learning for health and social care professionals, both in the pre- and post-qualification stages. However, many people are apprehensive about what it involves and whether they will be able to study effectively in this way.

This book is designed to help students and their tutors to become acquainted with the issues and methods around being an online learner in health and social care. It gives practical advice and provides guidance on developing skills and attitudes for successful online learning within health and social care. Based on the authors' experience of teaching online, the book includes numerous tips and case studies. Topics discussed include:

• skills and responsibilities for successful online learning
• the virtual learning environment and using online resources
• clinical, professional and communication skills online
• assessment and evaluation.

Being an E-learner in Health and Social Care is essential reading for all students undertaking online courses or continuing professional development in nursing, public health, social work, social care and health psychology.

1 E-learning in health and social care

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to give you an overview of the development, meaning and value of e-learning in health and social care. This will help you to think about where e-learning has come from and what its value, as a way of learning, is likely to be for you. It will also help you to identify the pitfalls you are likely to face as an e-learner. The chapter will focus on the current education culture in health and social care education as this is the context in which you will be learning. It will also provide you with an understanding of the background to some of the specific issues around e-learning in health and social care. This will include a discussion of the advantages of e-learning for you and your colleagues and help you to develop a positive attitude towards the process.

What is e-learning?

In order to explain the meaning and value of e-learning, we must begin with the Internet – commonly known as the World Wide Web (Web or www). The arrival of the Internet has been the main catalyst for the fact that digital technology is changing how we do business and live our lives. With a worldwide population of around 6.5 billion, one Internet usage survey (ComScore 2006) claims that there are as many as 694 million people using the Internet (as of May 2006). It is important to remember that, although this represents a large percentage of the world’s population, there are large tracts of developing countries that have little or no Internet access at all. You could argue that such poor and isolated communities need the education that online access promises even more than wealthy communities. It is also worth remembering that poorer communities in wealthier countries have relatively low access and usage of the Internet generally.

The Internet is an ever expanding electronic network of computers that operates worldwide, providing access to millions of resources. It enables each computer to have an address that is accessible to all other Internet-connected computers. It has actually been around in some form since the early 1960s, but its use burgeoned during the 1990s, so much so that it has become an integral part of everyday life for the many people across the globe who use it to access information, work, play and to communicate with others.

Radio-based systems now allow transmission of information without a physical connection. The advent of wireless communication means that Internet users can take a computer away from the traditional desk and use it remotely anywhere a radio signal is available. Many of these computers are now very small – not much bigger than a mobile telephone or a small book. We can see people using the Internet in hotel foyers, coffee shops and railway stations, as well as in their homes, schools, colleges and universities. Yet, if someone had said, even perhaps only in the early 1990s, that all this would be possible today they would have been accused of being somewhat crazy. There is a saying that every person on the globe is now only six or seven connections away from any other.

It is important to stress again, however, that access to the Internet is not universal. Those people who are disengaged from society, socially excluded, living in poverty or in remote parts of the world, for example, are as yet unable to engage in this new approach to many aspects of life. One could argue that it is now the responsibility of better off governments and individuals across the globe to ensure that such communities and individuals are enabled to connect to the Internet in order to ensure that the gap between those who have and those who have not does not become wider. As a health and social care professional this is something of which you should be very much aware.

Internet technology is also starting to have an impact on the way that we deliver health and social care. Not only does it provide access to information about patients and clients, but also it allows developments in care such as ‘telemedicine’. This is where technology, including audio and video, is used for medical diagnosis and patient care when the health care practitioner and client are at a distance, such as in remote areas of countries like Scotland and Australia. Many support groups for people with distressing medical conditions or specific social problems are often now conducted using the Internet (see Box 1.1).

The availability of the Internet has large potential advantages for learning across all age groups. Most schools, and almost every university and college across the globe, now have high-speed Internet access. Teachers increasingly use information and communications technology (ICT) to bring their teaching to life (Department for Education and Skills (DfES) 2005). E-learning is a term that you may have heard many times, yet you might still be uncertain of its real meaning and relevance to you. It is a concept that is often referred to in relation to health and social care education and practice. It is important that, before you set out on your e-learning journey, you understand where e-learning has come from and what relevance it has to your education and practice and that of your colleagues.

E-learning has a number of related terms that, essentially, mean the same thing. The most common ones are:

• online learning
• computer mediated learning
• computer conferencing
• virtual learning
• online learning communities
• blended learning
• learning objects
• distributed learning
• web-based learning.

All of these terms, along with the term e-learning itself, refer to the use of computer and Internet-based technologies to deliver a broad range of learning opportunities that are designed to enhance your knowledge, skills and performance. These learning opportunities are networked. This means that they are available via a computer connection (usually the Internet) accessible to more than one person at the same time. They, therefore, allow storage, retrieval and sharing of information and learning material – giving students and their tutors access to learning materials and communication within the learning community 24 hours a day from any Internet-connected computer on the globe. Learning opportunities are delivered to the learner via a computer that uses standard Internet technology and it focuses on the broadest views of learning that go beyond traditional approaches (Rosenberg 2001). It is about much more than the delivery of learning materials, but about a new approach to the facilitation of learning (see Box 1.2).

Box 1.1

An example of online patient/client support online: the Tuberculosis Survival Project

http://www.tbsurvivalproject.org (accessed 24 August 2006)

This website was created in recognition of the fact that the emotional and psychological support that many patients with TB or multi-drugresistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) receive is inadequate. Being treated and cured of TB/MDR-TB is not just about taking medication. There are many factors that can lead to treatment failure.

The Internet enables this site to provide its service of information and support right across the entire globe 24 hours a day. The site provides a one-to-one mentoring service where cured individuals give ongoing support by email to those who may not be able to talk about their disease and treatment to others because of the stigma involved.

Box 1.2

E-learning scenarios

Here are two scenarios that highlight the differences between traditional approaches to learning and e-learning.

Traditional learning delivery

Helen is a qualified health/social care professional who works with children in a small town. She has been qualified for some years and is thinking of seeking promotion. She decides to enrol on a course to update her knowledge and skills in the area of practice in which she works. She enrols on a course at her local university – it is broadly relevant to the work that she does and she feels confident that it should help her to move forward in her practice. The course takes two years and will mean that she needs to attend lectures and seminars at the university for one day a week during semester time. She has access to experienced and knowledgeable teaching staff, the library where she can borrow books and a variety of other resources that are available both on the campus and through the university website. This means that Helen needs to be released from her workplace on a regular day each week and travel 25 miles from her home to the university.

E-learning delivery

Joanne is also a qualified health/social care practitioner who works with children in a different small town. Joanne is also thinking about extending her knowledge and skills, but she wants to make certain that she undertakes a programme that is entirely relevant to her practice with children with life-threatening conditions. Her local university provides courses that are broadly relevant, but she feels that she would benefit from a more specialist course. Following a search on the Internet she discovers that a university 150 miles away provides a course that is exactly what she is looking for. Fortunately, the course is delivered online via e-learning, so in spite of her concerns that she has not learnt in this way before, she decides to enrol. Joanne is provided with a tutor to guide her through the e-learning processes. She can contact the tutor by telephone, email or a variety of other online methods. With her fellow students, she uses a ‘virtual learning environment’, which she accesses via an Internet connection at home and in her workplace. The virtual learning environment provides her not only with learning materials for her reading and study, but also with communication tools so that she can discuss her thoughts, ideas and concerns with her tutor and fellow students. Because of the nature of the course, Joanne can schedule her study time to fit in with her weekly practice activity. She has found she learns best in the mornings so chooses two mornings each week in which to study online. At the beginning of the course she discovers that two of the students on the course are from another country.

E-learning has many similarities with distance learning. This is a mode of learning where the student is often some distance away, even in a different country, from the institution that provides the learning programme. The student is usually sent printed learning materials through the post and has access to a tutor via telephone and email. Many distance learning courses also arrange face-to-face tutorials and study workshops at intervals throughout the programme. E-learning is different from distance learning in the way that it uses online communication tools to maintain contact and socialization between students, their tutors and their fellow students. While distance learning does have some of the same flexibility as e-learning, it does not have the advantage of the communication options offered by online working.

Why e-learning?

There are certain features of health and social care education and practice that have led to increasing interest in e-learning as a method of delivery for education and staff development.

First, health and social care organizations employ large numbers of people with varied backgrounds and roles. For example, did you know that in the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) employs more people than any other organization in the country? This means that, in order to keep its staff well educated and well informed, the organizations involved have to be well organized and effective in the delivery of education and staff development. Economies of scale and organization are a very important consideration.

Next, the nature of health and social care practice is led by patients and clients. These are people in need of effective assessment, support and intervention in a variety of health and social care settings. Health and social care take place in a constantly changing environment where new knowledge and ideas are impacting on practice, education and management on a daily basis. The need, therefore, for the staff that work in these organizations to be well educated, up to date and highly skilled is paramount. Health and social care professionals need to communicate with each other, not just locally but globally, in order to ensure that innovative ideas, new trends and effective practice are shared amongst the practice community. The logistics of keeping large numbers of professionals with common goals in touch with each other are considered one of the major challenges of health and social care practice today and this can have a great impact on the experience of the patient or client.

As online courses and materials become increasingly available, interactive and innovative health and social care workers will be able to work through problem-solving simulations of practice situations so that they are able to see the consequences of their actions, choices and the decisions they make. This enables practitioners to learn about situations and actions in a safe environment by learning from their mistakes (Dawes and Handscomb 2002). An example of this in health care is in emergency trauma care wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. E-learning in health and social care
• 2. Skills for successful online learning
• 3. The role of the student in online learning
• 4. The role of the tutor in online learning
• 5. Using online study resources
• 6. The virtual learning environment
• 7. Learning objects
• 8. Working in online communities
• 9. Professional issues in online learning
• 10. Clinical and communication skills and online learning
• 11. Assessment evaluation and research
• Appendix: Alphabetical list of websites and URLs used in this book
• Glossary
• Index