REFLECTION ON E-LEARNING ASSIGNMENT

I was in turmoil in deciding upon the topic for my e-learning assignments. There is such a wide scope of topics that was applicable. I wanted to choose a topic that could be to the advantage of my own department, students and facilitators. My teaching domain is Service Learning (SL). I realized that I had to keep the project small and simple, and every topic I chose turned out to be a major project!

Then came the student strikes!. The one contingency plan after the other was made at the University and we were swamped with work to try and catch up classes and assessments. Important classes were missed, one of them being a class for recapping history taking in patients for the 4^th year MBChB students.

Our students follow a longitudinal SL course, and in their 4^th year there is a capstone SL module where the students have to fully screen patients for health care problems, make a differential diagnosis and refer them for management. To be able to do that they had to be able to take a comprehensive history from a patient. In the past this has been a big problem for us because the students battled with the skill. They had learnt history taking for 3 years prior to this block, but they could not meet the expected objectives. Even though revision material and instructions were given on blackboard as pre-requisite to the clinical training in the community, the students still came unprepared to the clinical sites for screening.

I implemented an additional facilitation session in class before going to the service learning block. The standard of history taking became better, but still some students did not know their theory, a great embarrassment in front of the patients!  Attendance of the classes was also not satisfactory.

In my search for topics for my assignment I came upon a video that presented history taking for medical students that I found very good. The presenter had an informal attitude and made looking at the video a pleasure. I posted the 3 videos on blackboard and what a great response! Students said they were tired of reading the information, and by looking and listening they found much more to learn.

It shows that it was never necessary for me to re-invent the wheel – I just had to go and search on the internet

Duh Debbie!

MPhil Diseased Debbie