On one hand, I REALLY enjoy all the knowledge I have acquired in this program so far. It has been a pleasant surprise in my world of didactic learning. I enjoy how fun it is to create a blog, a Wiki, research a whole bunch of sites, and even have some of them lauded by my facilitators who state that they will be used in future classes. So actually I have a legacy in this program! That is an honor and I am grateful for their appreciation of my research. I have learned so much here that it is mind-boggling.
One of the things I have learned is that the design of the class is so very important. When I first came into the class, I couldn't navigate the site to save my soul. It took me quite a long tie to understand where all the material was located and how to retrieve it. I mean A LONG TIME! I couldn't make heads or tails out of how the class was set up to save my soul. So if I learned anything about design, it would be that the simpler, the better.
The classes that I have taught in the past were already set up and the curriculum established. This was done because of the medical oversight needed to approve these courses to meet certain educational, state, and federal standards. As far as I know, there is no online course that has been developed that addresses the entry-level student into the field. There are many courses that are out in the internet that address continuing education for the practitioner. So developing a full course for this career in an online environment may be the wagon train that blazes the new frontier.
I believe that the only way this course can be taught is via the hybrid model. The skills that the student will have to perform would have to be demonstrated and the rationale would have to explained in a face-to-face environment in front of the instructor or a preceptor. Obviously it would be hard to ascertain the skill level of the student in a video but more importantly we, as evaluators, need to see how the student reacts in a semi-anxious or agitated state. This is needed because we can weed out those who would not be a good fit the the job and its inherent stressors.
The design process for this class would have to be ultra simple because of the educational requirements for the student. We don't expect too much from them as most come in with little or no medical knowledge and many did not have too much exposure to computers aside from playing games on one. We have also found that these students are not college material. They want to learn a skill and go to work. Period, end-of-story. They do express a desire to go on to be paramedics (which is the next level up in the food chain) because of several factors most often due to the increase in salary and the marketability they would have to go on a fire department.
My expectations for this class is to learn how to design an efficient, self-contained, user-friendly course. And the more user-friendly, the better! I am in great fear for the students that I will teach if they had to negotiate WebCt or even this new Blackboard that I am involved with now. I am not in any way saying that I am brighter than my students in the world of computers. They may be far more advanced than I am. But to learn emergency medicine AND the learning management system for the course would be a highly frustrating endeavor for most of them.
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