ePULab - An Adaptive e-Learning Tool for Pressure Ulcer Evaluation

Pressure ulcers (PrU) are considered as one of the most challenging problems that Nursing professionals have to deal with in their daily practice. Nowadays, the education on PrUs is manly based on traditional lecturing, seminars and face-to-face instruction, sometimes with the support of photographs of wounds being used as teaching material. This traditional educational methodology suffers from some important limitations, which could affect the efficacy of the learning process. This current study has been designed to introduce information and communication technologies (ICT) in the education on PrU for undergraduate students, with the main objective of evaluating the advantages an disadvantages of using ICT, by comparing the learning results obtained from using an e-learning tool with those from a traditional teaching methodology. In order to meet this major objective, a web-based learning system named ePULabhas been designed and developed as an adaptive e-learning tool for the autonomous acquisition of knowledge on PrU evaluation. In this article, the ePULab software is described in details and the general results from an experimental educational validation study are also presented and analysed.