Accessibility and Interactivity in Distance Education Programs for Health Professions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reports a two-year study of students’ experiences of accessibility and interactivity in distance education programs for health professions. Through surveys and focus groups with students, instructors, and administrative staff, we found that accessibility and interactivity are interconnected and are important determinants of students’ success in distance education programs for health professions. Women with full-time employment in urban areas who were studying part time—many as single parents—constituted most students in the five health professions studied: disability management, health services administration, nursing, occupational therapy, and social work. Undergraduate and graduate education courses were offered primarily through WebCT. Highlights of students’ experiences were that instructors are a useful resource; accessibility requires students’ confidence and technical skills, particularly in on-line library searches; and opportunities for required and voluntary interactivity reduce the loneliness and loss of community experienced in distance education. Research findings have both administrative and academic implications for improving distance education programs for health professions. Cet article rend compte d’une recherche de deux ans sur les experiences des etudiants avec l’accessibilite et l’interactivite dans des programmes de formation a distance pour des professions dans le domaine de la sante. Par le biais d’enquetes et de groupes de discussion (focus group) avec des etudiants, des professeurs et du personnel administratif, nous avons trouve que l’accessibilite et l’interactivite sont interconnectees et sont des facteurs importants du succes des etudiants dans des programmes de formation a distance pour des professionnels de la sante. Des femmes travaillant a temps plein dans des regions urbaines et qui etudiaient a temps partiel - plusieurs d’entre elles en tant que meres celibataires – constituaient la plupart des etudiants dans les cinq professions de la sante etudiees : la gestion de services aux personnes handicapees, l’administration des services de sante, la profession d’infirmiere, la sante au travail et le travail social. Les cours de premier cycle et de cycles superieurs etaient offerts principalement par le biais de WebCT. Les points les plus marquants des experiences des etudiants etaient : les profes- seurs sont une ressource utile; l’accessibilite necessite la confiance des etudiants et des habiletes techniques, particulierement dans les recherches en ligne en biblio- theque; et finalement les occasions d’interactivite exigee et volontaire reduisent la solitude et le manque d’un sentiment de communaute qui sont eprouves en forma- tion a distance. Les resultats de la recherche ont des implications a la fois adminis- tratives et pedagogiques pour l’amelioration des programmes de formation a distance pour des professions dans le domaine de la sante.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".