Educational Effectiveness of a 5-Country Virtual Exchange Program for Internationalization in Occupational Therapy Education: Mixed Methods Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Global health care education that cultivates international orientation is important for providing medical care in consideration of diverse backgrounds and collaboration with foreign medical professionals. Virtual international exchange programs could be a new type of global education in the present postpandemic era. Objective: This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of a virtual international exchange program in fostering quality academic and professional learning and international orientation from student perspectives across 5 countries. This research is expected to contribute to education for the development of global human resources in the health professions. Methods: This quasi-experimental study used a before-and-after design using a convergent parallel mixed methods approach. In this study, a 5-day interactive virtual program was offered to occupational therapy students from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand. The students were asked about their expectations and international orientation before the program, and about their evaluation of the program and international orientation afterward. Numerical data from a questionnaire on program expectations and evaluations were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Data on international orientation were subjected to qualitative analysis using steps for coding and theorization. Results: In total, 29 students participated in the program, out of which 12 students (response ratio 41.4%) answered the research questionnaires both before and after the program. Overall, the students' expectations of the program were met in terms of expertise, scientific learning skills, and group interactions. Comparing before and after the program, mean scores of how the program met expectations increased, and the mean scores after the program in all 12 items asking about program evaluation were from 3.8 (SD 1.19) to 4.9 (SD 0.67; range: score 1 [lowest]-5 [highest]). Even though their motivation for participating in the program was not specific before the program, after the program, they reported having a more concrete image and specific form of what they learned from an international perspective. The participants enjoyed communication with others from diverse backgrounds while recognizing the difficulty of understanding different values. They also expressed satisfaction with their understanding of occupational therapy professionals and diverse societies, including medical systems from other countries. Conclusions: Even though the analyzed sample data were small, these findings suggest that the program in this study may provide the participants with valuable opportunities. The virtual exchange program could foster students to cultivate qualities such as problem-finding or problem-solving and having interactions with groups from diverse backgrounds.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".