Project based experiential distance education: an oxymoron?
Introduction
Evidence accumulates [1], [2] that experiential learning is preferable for many purposes to mere conveyance of knowledge based on traditional classroom lectures. This holds particularly in health informatics education, where the development of attitudes, interpersonal skills, and skills at solving real world problems, are important goals for the education of professionals. This is particularly true in teaching subjects like systems analysis, systems engineering, quality improvement, systems procurement, where most methods appear, and often are, quite trivial until one tries to select and apply them to a real world problem. Moreover, their application hinges on the ability to create multidisciplinary teams and guide them productively to success. In our experience, the experiential, project-based education approach is beneficial in achieving these goals.
As we are moving towards distance education, the question arises how this didactic approach can be translated into the new education mode. Common approaches to project-based experiential learning, such as the involvement of students in real world projects, are difficult enough when carried out with a group of local students and professionals. Their translation into distance mode, where students are distributed over large areas, such as all of Canada, if not the world, poses new problems. Is the combination of project-based with distance education therefore an oxymoron? This paper reviews the principles, the experience with several project based courses, and discusses the alternatives for their translation into distance mode (Table 1).
Section snippets
Background
The University of Victoria’s School of Health Information Science was formally established in 1982 with the mission to improve health care delivery systems by educating individuals to be effective developers, users, and managers of health information resources; by advancing knowledge through research; and by providing a consultative service to the health care community [3]. The school strives to prepare broadly educated individuals with a thorough understanding of the principles of information
The principles
Experiential learning can be stimulated whenever learners are challenged to solve a task that has not been presented to them in this form and reaches therefore beyond mere reproduction of knowledge presented by some source, such as a textbook or an instructor. This is a principle underlying many educational exercises, laboratories, etc. Problem-based learning puts the problem at the core of the didactic efforts and builds the didactic material around the solution of problems [5], [6]. While we
Information management and technology
This fourth year course is a ‘capstone course’ which relies on the skills and knowledge that the students developed over the preceding 3 years and identifies the major Information Management and Technology (IM&T) issues that they will likely face in their careers [9]. It started out as an exercise in information system procurement, in which students adopted the role of various professionals in a health care environment and developed a negotiated approach to the development of an information
Conversion to distance mode
The greatest challenge to the conversion of this type of educational approach to distance delivery is preservation of the project component, and of the intense interaction among students working on a project, and with professionals. We see essentially three alternatives for this (Table 1):
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Local project with remote learners.
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Individual project(s) of remote learner.
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Mock project.
Discussion
The preference arrived at on the basis of the considerations above is somewhat contradicted by the experience of the University of Aalborg in Denmark [12], [13]. Here a distance program has been offered since the early nineties which is built around problem oriented project based teaching. This program is offered to health professionals who are engaged in their professional pursuits and enroll in the health informatics program on a part time basis, and are pursuing health informatics skills to
Conclusion
Experiential, project-based didactic approaches have proven advantageous in health informatics but pose challenging problems for translation into distance education. For our purposes, the local project with remote learners may present a solution if the responsibility for the project is closely associated with the responsibility for the educational endeavor. It depends, however, on continued reliable availability of suitable projects and involved collaborators. The mock project may also present
Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the Office of Learning Technology (OLT) under project number 21048, and by transition funds from HEALNet, a Canadian Network of Centres of Excellence funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Industry Canada.
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