National
Network in Distance Education in Medicine and Health
The Edumed.Net Project
Aims
The general
aim of the present project is to endow Brazilian higher education in health
sciences with a consortium and a network of distance education based on
the technologies of Internet, Satellite TV and videoconference, with the
purpose of increasing the quality and variety of courses and other support
materials for continued medical education at all levels (undergraduate,
graduate, residence, extension and diffusion).
This
infrastructure has as the final aim of increasing the quality of learning,
teaching and information access in Brazilian educational institutions in
health sciences. Therefore, it wil incread indirectly the quality of health
care, research and education in the area. This objective will be achieved
by means of a Knowledge Cooperative, that is, an at-a-distance collaborative
process which will allow the building of on-line courses, lectures and
contents of a higher quality and offering them to users who are normally
deprived of it by reasons of geographical distance or isolation. It will
also serve as a medium to increase the interchange of experiences, data
and knowledge among the participants in the EduMed network, in the areas
of training, teaching and learning.
Other
objectives of the project will be:
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To develop
methodologies and programs for content creation, for the interlinking of
several media and for dissemination throughout the network, especially
those that use interactive synchronous and asynchronous technologies.
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To investigate
the impact of these long-distance methodologies on education and learning
in the target populations, especially regarding objective indicators of
quality and depth, and its consequences on professional education.
The
final scope of this project intends to be the set of all higher educations
schools, either public or private, in areas such as Medicine, Dentistry,
Nursing, Physical Therapy, Speech Therapy, Nutrition, Pharmacy and Biochemistry,
Psychology, etc., as well as research and development institutes, hospitals,
clinics, public health organization, etc.
Structure
and Functioning
Initially,
each one of the involved institutions will have telerooms (classrooms especially
adapted for reception and emission of videoconferencing programs, interactive
teleconferencing and use of the Internet, large format TV apparatus, digital
cameras for the capture of images, microphone, videocassette recorder,
videoconferencing system, satellite reception and antenna, etc, as well
as a network of multimedia microcomputers. Access to network will be possible
by means of digital dedicated telephone lines (ISDN, cable TV or ADSL)
and in some locations where this is possible, dedicated fiber optic cable
with the minimum speed of 2 megabits per sec.
This
classroom shall be publicly available for 24-hr continuous access by all
teachers and students of the institution and it will be possible to use
it for other aims such as conferences and seminars. The objective, therefore,
will be to make available a platform at each location that integrates two
main technologies: broadband video/audio, via digital broadcasting, and
interactivity, via Internet and the Web. This will allow for a broad flexibility
in authoring content and interactivity by means of a mix of several synchronous
and asynchronous technologies carried by means of different bandwidths,
which will be chosen and optimized in function of the nature of each activity.
This
teleroom will be used for:
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Carrying
out microcomputers courses, internet access and applications of multimedia
in education;
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Use by
teachers and courses on the applications of informatics in the support
of education activities;
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Classes
by mean of TV resoruces (videocassette, videodisc or satellite TV);
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Interactive
videoconferencing (classes, seminars, round tables, clinical cases, discussions,
etc.);
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Telemedicine
sessions;
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Telework
meetings between groups of professionals and students of several parts
in Brazil and abroad, including congresses and other events;
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Generation
and transmission of teaching materials;
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Access
to on-line courses available via the Internet;
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Navigation
on the Internet for searching and localizaling the information needed for
researching and teaching.
All the
transmissions will be stored onto videotape and will be part of a local
library which later will be made available to students for individual studies.
Therefore, in a very short time, there will be a big collection, which
will be distributed all over Brazil. They will also be made available in
compressed digital format, which will be distributed by on-demand video
servers. Furthermore, there will be a number of courses based on e-mail
or the Web which will be used by institutions to support partially or totally
their courses or they will be able to be accompanied at a distance in the
microcomputer laboratory or in the houses of students. The institutes associated
to the consortium, other public or private teaching institutions, foundations
and companies, etc., will be also allowed to disseminate its contents for
education by means of agreement with the consortium.
The
health education system structured on the Internet will offer a modular
system based on credits. Its strategy will be to offer content, which will
contemplate a broad range of courses. In order to reach that objective
The Institute will sign agreements and contracts with national and foreign
universities, research institutes, scientific societies and hospitals,
and take advantage of the courses already given by those organizations,
as well as contracting for the development of additional content.
The
EduMed.Net network, by means of a web site, will centralize the links to
all courses of short, medium and long duration an will operate an on-line
management system for enrolling students, offer content and perform student
tracking, evaluation and certification. Among the resources which will
the educators will be able to make available by means of courses are: virtual
classrooms (text/audio, clinical discussions, telemedicine), laboratory
(software, simulations), audiovisual central (slides show, videos, audios,
library, books magazines and on-line monographs, Internet resource listings
with bibliographic search, forums, discussion lists, bulletin boards and
e-mail newsletters.
The
courses will be assembled into modules, that is, each course will be have
at least one module and the courses with longer duration course will have
a larger number of modules. Each module will be self-contained, in other
words, it will include enrollment, teaching, tutorship, evaluation and
certification. In courses with more than one module, the transition from
one module to another will obey a tree of pre-requisites and the approval
on the preceding modules. Each module will have an associated number of
credits, which will be quantified on the basis of the average number of
the hours needed to complete the module.
Courses
Modalities
CME Courses
of Short Duration
These
courses will address topics of high specialization, such as updating on
diagnoses and therapeutically concepts, molecular biology, etc, and will
be slanted for the educational specialists. Examples: New Approaches in
the Treatment of Policystic Ovary; The Utilization of Gangliosides in the
Treatment of Amiotrophic Syndromes; Trans-Esophagic Ecocardiography in
the Diagnosis of Congenital Cardiopathies. They will demand between 4 to
6 hours of dedication of the student to complete the module.
CME Courses
of Medium Duration
They will
address more comprehensive topics, which will demand two or more modules
for coverage. Typically they will cover specializing updated topics or
updating for physicians of other specialties. They will cover etiology,
clinical pathology, diagnosis, therapy, prognosis, patient management,
etc. Examples: Type II Diabetes; Clinical Immunology in Aids; Work Ergonomy;
Introduction to Neurobiology for Clinicians. They will demand 20 to 60
hours of dedication to complete the course.
Specialization
Courses
They
will cover extensive subject areas, will be relatively autonomous and correspond
to graduate courses. They will be composed by several sub-courses, each
one with the size similar to those of short duration CME courses. Furthermore,
they will involve the elaboration and a virtual presentation of a final
monograph, which will be mainly bibliographic reviews, analysis of patient
cases or experimental studies. Example: Specialization in Clinical Informatics.
Specialization in Work Medicine. Specialization in inborn Errors of Metabolism.
They will demand 360 to 720 hours of student dedication to complete the
course; and they will be accredited by institutions which are recognized
by the Ministry of Education.
Development
In
order to develop the courses and the content, an advanced system for distance
collaboration and course management will be set up. An authoring system
for courses will be adopted, in order to automatize and facilitate the
production of learning resources, by following structured modules, even
for health care professors with little knowledge of Informatics. Training
will be giving to the content producers about the methodology creation.
The
Institute will also publish a monthly newsletter and posters containing
daily, weekly, monthly and annual programming of the center to massive
distribution to all the physicians, students and other health care Brazilian
professionals, which also will available on the Internet site.
Faculty
The
faculty for these courses will be high quality. Lecturers with a high degree
of training and opinion leaders will be identified in several national
and international institutions and invited to develop modules or courses
on a fee basis. Furthermore, they will receive honoraria for the tutorship
in which they will participate, which will be derived from the fees paid
by the students.
Collaborative
agreements will be celebrated with other distance education entities in
Medicine in foreign countries, in order to allow for the translation, adaptation,
and offering of their courses in Brazil.
Certification
The
courses will be certified: Upon completing a discipline or course and being
approved with a minimum mark in evaluation, a certificate will be issued
to the student, and will be co-signed by the university, in order to give
more credibility and authority to it. The student may accumulate credits
according to specialty and then be certified according to the the cumulative
number of credits, purposes of hearing, job promotion, diploma recertification,
etc., with the medical societies and the Brazilian Medical Association,
according to a CME system which is been currently proposed by these entities.
The institute will promote the public valuation of credits by means of
a collaborative agreements with hospitals, medical schools, governmental
institutions, etc., for the sake of promotion and hiring.
Project
Viability
Once
the needed resources are assured, the project does not present problems
of viability regarding hardware, software and technical infrastructure.
The most critical problems of viability could be:
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Speed,
efficiency and implementation of the infrastructure and the participants.
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The creation
and continuing maintenance of a culture of utilization of distance education
resources;
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The setting
up of coordination control, communication and evaluation structures; training
of users in the institutions; and the implementation of efficient and continuing
structure for technical support and maintenance, etc.
Self-Sustainability
The
economical and organizational self sustaininability of EduMed project will
be based on the following:
-
Due to
the distributed nature of knowledge, part of the costs of development of
content and the management of the instructional process will be covered
by the material and human infrastructure made available by the participating
institutions.
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The capture
of presence-based courses which have already been developed.
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Payment
of academic fees. Another part of the cost will be covered by the payment
of enrollment fees by the students, with a fixed percentage destined to
the maintenance of the organizational structures of the consortium and
the institute.
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Grants
and donations on a pluri-annual basis by international and national governmental
of agencies, international organisms, etc.
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Sponsorships
or pharmaceutical companies, Internet health care portals, free access
Internet companies, etc.
A well-planned
and executed economic model will assure without doubt the continuing self-sustaininability
of this project, because it follows traditional, already tested models
of medical education financing. The centralized structures (Institute and
Consortium) for carrying out organization, control and evaluation, will
have its maintenance assured by means of a percentage of the global revenue
of educational projects disseminated via its educational offerings grid. |
