Online education: a flexible learning tool for training residents in Psychiatry

Abstract

Introduction: Online learning has shown to be an effective tool for medical teaching; it provides a solution to the problems of access to information and standardizes the quality of education. This approach encourages independent learning and facilitates that students continue developing competencies and skills for their professional lives.

Objective: To report our experience on the design and development of an online course for medical residents in psychiatry in Mexico.

Methods: An agreement between the National Institute of Public Health and the Psychiatric Care Services was established. It allowed the creation of a virtual course on Health Systems, which is part of the curriculum of the specialty in Psychiatry. The INSP trained the teachers in instructional design and in the use of the Moodle platform. Through this, the following variables were measured: number of visits to bibliographic content, time spent on the completion of questionnaires, in the diagnostic and final evaluations as well as the grades of them; the total amount of time spent in the platform, the number of visits to each of the teaching resources and their participation on two forums.

Results: Twenty-six students were enrolled. We observed that the time spent in platform was 90 minutes per day; the median time spent in evaluations was 1.75 hours. 38.46% of the students consulted all the readings, 767 visits were recorded for the first forum and 448 for the second. Those who participated more than two times obtained a final grade of 92.53. No correlation was statistically significant for any of the above variables.

Conclusions: These courses require interinstitucional and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as their inclusion in the medical residency program´s budgets. The platform allowed us to register the activities of the students, being that an advantage over traditional education. The time spent on the platform exceeded that of the classroom. The discussion forums were the activity that showed a greater learning, having higher quality participation.