Distance education for health professions’ students

This paper concerns the use of Moodle 2 as a suitable tool to improve the online learning project for the Health Profession courses offered by the University of Genoa. The student syllabus requires attendance to formal lectures and practical training sessions. Some of the Health Profession courses of our University (e.g., nursing, physiotherapy, and radiology technologist) are taught at different venues across the Liguria Region to facilitate students’ access to high education and enhance quality of lifelong teaching programs at local health centers. Over the years, managing this complex teaching network has called for the development of new educational tools supported by AulaWeb, the Moodle environment of our University. At the beginning, teachers used AulaWeb merely for information storage. In this experimental project, we investigated how to make some courses more attractive by proposing them in a blended form. Eventually we managed to catch the students’ attention also for courses offered totally online. This approach meets two relevant requirements, (a) to ensure consistency, compliance, and quality of teaching at all local centers, (b) to reduce travel expenses for teachers lecturing at different venues. Thanks to the new features of Moodle 2, such as tools to monitor conditioned assets and track the activities performed and/or completed by students, we could arrange online courses that also ensure access of students to attentive and prompt tutorial mentoring.