Mobile Learning as a Means for Training Health Care Workers at the Tertiary Level

1. Mobile Learning as a Means for Training Health Care Workers at the Tertiary Level Silke Günther Steinbeis-Business Academy Benjamin Feldner, Gabriele Schulz-Salveter

2. Introduction • Brief description of context • Degree course to acquire a Bachelor of Arts in Nursing, being developed at Steinbeis Business Academy in Berlin in cooperation with the DRK-Schwesternschaft • Future health care workers can start during the last year of their vocational training and stay enrolled within the first two years of their professional career • Objective • Support health care workers in meeting the increasingly recognized scientific demands of their profession • Blended learning scenarios • Moodle courses

3. Research question • German health care workers tend to experience a gap between nursing taught at colleges and their experiences on wards or during ambulatory care • College/ward divide sparked a debate on the changing place of theory • Can integrating mobile learning scenarios into a degree course familiarize health care students with teaching and learning methodologies that bridge the gap between colleges and wards?

4. Why use mobile learning? • Coupled with open-source software tools, mobile devices already accompany health care students in both realms • Developing insight into the scientific underpinnings of nursing without tying the experience to classroom-bound education • Preparing health care workers for lifelong learning processes

5. Developing mobile learning scenarios • Steinbeis Business Academy already offers a variety of Moodle courses to its students • Moodle is the most widely spread open source Learning management system (LMS) in Germany • Making use of available infrastructure and experiences • Adding mobile learning by making the course material accessible via Moodle for Mobile Phones (MOMO)

6. Moodle for Mobile Phones • MOMO is an Add-On for Moodle that enables its users to implement mobile learning scenarios using Moodle as a backend • Users need to install a Java-based application on their mobile phones to access Moodle courses • Designing courses that incorporate mobile elements or offering entire mobile learning scenarios using the tools and methods offered by Moodle

7. The first mobile learning scenario I • Aid students in constructing knowledge on scientific procedures and research • Prepare them for forms of Evidence-Based Nursing (EBN) – basing nursing practise on nursing knowledge • In general, scenarios should leverage the potential of quickly getting access to scientific resources, such as specific data bases for health care literature

8. The first mobile learning scenario II • Acquiring the skills to quickly locate, retrieve and evaluate nursing literature • Students apply their skills in the context of scenarios that require them to make informed decisions on current issues in inpatient as well as outpatient care • Support the development of information literacy at the level of tertiary education

9. Evaluation • Work in progress • Degree course will start in autumn 2010 • One scenario will be evaluated • If a formative evaluation shows that the students benefit from blended learning scenarios, more courses will be made available

10. Critique/ reflections • Interdisciplinary cooperation • Level of tertiary education • Using mobile learning at different levels of training health care workers • Suitable topics • Clearly work in progress