ENHANCING MEDICAL CURRICULA VIA ONLINE PROBLEM BASED LEARNING – EXPERIENCES USING WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES

During the last few decades, medical education is increasingly embracing active learning approaches. This shift from teaching to learning is also strongly related to an involvement of information and communication technology, and especially the Internet and the Web. The emergence of Web 2.0 is indeed being stressed as a promising tool for advanced support of medicine and medical education. Although Web 2.0 emphasizes on participation, it is used, in the majority of cases, as for content provision (albeit the dynamic creation of content via user/peer participation and collaboration) and subsequent delivery to students. In this paper, we shift the aforementioned emphasis of the use of wikis and blogs towards active support for problem based learning in medicine. The approach is based on a blended learning scheme, where e-learning is actually complimentary to traditional classes (lectures, demos and labs), and it utilises the Moodle open source learning environment. Work is illustrated along three main objective lines: (a) deployment of problem-based sessions in virtual teams, where both students and instructors may be located in remote institutions; (b) provision of tools for student inquiry and collaboration; and (c) provision of mechanisms for continuous monitoring/assessment and evaluation, thereby, addressing direct knowledge, as well as, any tacit competencies targeted via PBL. Our approach combines collaborative tools such as wikis, blogs and forums in order to provide problem based learning solely on the web. The entire learning episode and all its steps (with the final problem/answer deployment) are recorded, commended on and monitored via the wiki (final and intermediate versions) and the participants’ blogs. Evaluation results indicate that Web 2.0 technologies have a major role to play within the educational arena.