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Active 8 years, 1 month ago
Description
Purpose
Many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) urgently need more trained healthcare staff to deliver eye care services. There are 285m visually impaired people globally, 90% live in LMICs.
To address this issue, our programme aims to:
- Scale up the impact of a successful face-to-face course in public health eye care using Open Education (OpenEd) approaches and create content relevant at a local level.
- Build sustainability and capacity by promoting OpenEd amongst eye care educators internationally
Methods
We created a short, openly licensed, online course:
- Content applicable across multiple cultures and settings.
- Hypothetical case study for application of learning
- Local course mentors who support discussion and share experience
- Bite-size resources published in multiple formats for access needs and learning preferences
- Delivered pilot on institutional Moodle with eye care workers from Kenya, Botswana and Ghana
- Global delivery twice on Futurelearn
Data collected on participant demographics, engagement and attitudes to OpenEd through pre- and post-course surveys, analytics and qualitative interviews.
Findings
- 3,001 participants have actively engaged with the course
- First online course for 84% of respondents in pilot and 64% on Futurelearn (1st run)
- Satisfaction: 98% of pilot respondents thought it was a good learning experience. 96% thought course was good or excellent on Futurelearn.
Qualitative findings:
- Internet access remains challenging
- Application of learning: clinical practice and educational re-use
Next steps
Facilitate four African educational institutions to adapt the course for their contexts and training curriculi. We will support development of an international community of interest in OpenEd eye care.