3rd WLE mobile learning Symposium, 27 March 2009, WLE, London

Mobile Learning as a Means for Training Health Care Workers at the Tertiary Level

Silke Günther

Steinbeis-Business Academy

Benjamin Feldner, Gabriele Schulz-Salveter

3rd WLE mobile learning Symposium, 27 March 2009, WLE, London

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Brief description of context

Degree course to acquire a Bachelor of Arts in Nursing, being developed at Steinbeis Business Academy in Berlin in cooperation with the DRK-Schwesternschaft

Future health care workers can start during the last year of their vocational training and stay enrolled within the first two years of their professional career

Objective

Support health care workers in meeting the increasingly recognized scientific demands of their profession

Blended learning scenarios

Moodle courses

Introduction

3rd WLE mobile learning Symposium, 27 March 2009, WLE, London

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Research question

German health care workers tend to experience a gap between nursing taught at colleges and their experiences on wards or during ambulatory care

College/ward divide sparked a debate on the changing place of theory

Can integrating mobile learning scenarios into a degree course familiarize health care students with teaching and learning methodologies that bridge the gap between colleges and wards?

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Why use mobile learning?

Coupled with open-source software tools, mobile devices already accompany health care students in both realms

Developing insight into the scientific underpinnings of nursing without tying the experience to classroom-bound education

Preparing health care workers for lifelong learning processes

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Developing mobile learning scenarios

Steinbeis Business Academy already offers a variety of Moodle courses to its students

Moodle is the most widely spread open source Learning management system (LMS) in Germany

Making use of available infrastructure and experiences

Adding mobile learning by making the course material accessible via Moodle for Mobile Phones (MOMO)

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Moodle for Mobile Phones

MOMO is an Add-On for Moodle that enables its users to implement mobile learning scenarios using Moodle as a backend

Users need to install a Java-based application on their mobile phones to access Moodle courses

Designing courses that incorporate mobile elements or offering entire mobile learning scenarios using the tools and methods offered by Moodle

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Aid students in constructing knowledge on scientific procedures and research

Prepare them for forms of Evidence-Based Nursing (EBN) – basing nursing practise on nursing knowledge

In general, scenarios should leverage the potential of quickly getting access to scientific resources, such as specific data bases for health care literature

The first mobile learning scenario I

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The first mobile learning scenario II

Acquiring the skills to quickly locate, retrieve and evaluate nursing literature

Students apply their skills in the context of scenarios that require them to make informed decisions on current issues in inpatient as well as outpatient care

Support the development of information literacy at the level of tertiary education

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Evaluation

Work in progress

Degree course will start in autumn 2010

One scenario will be evaluated

If a formative evaluation shows that the students benefit from blended learning scenarios, more courses will be made available

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Critique/ reflections Interdisciplinary cooperation

Level of tertiary education

Using mobile learning at different levels of training health care workers

Suitable topics

Clearly work in progress