Global Learning Course Certification

There is an increasing interest in the use of online learning in medical and health sciences education from early undergraduate years through residency and fellowship training, and in continuing medical education (CME).  This increased interest raises the issue of quality assurance since the conversation is turning from remote instruction as an exception to a new ongoing reality in education.

Recently, there have been efforts to standardize the necessary criteria for developing new content, adopting efficient teaching methods for online learning and establishing resources, yet there haven’t been specific attempts within the context of medical education and health science education.   Bari and Djouab (Bari M, Djouab R. Quality Frameworks and Standards in ELearning Systems. Int J Comput Internet Manage Technol. 2014;22(33):1–7.) found that the existing standards or frameworks need to be modified to fit with the context of specific institutions. Despite all the existing attempts, there remains a need to generate operational guidelines to guide execution of online education focusing on building and evaluating the experience in medical and health science education settings.

Many of the existing literature on online standards develops standards that address quality of content (International Organization for Standardization. 2015. ISO/IEC 19796–1:2005-Information technology—Learning, education and training— Quality management, assurance and metrics— Part 1: General approach. Retrieved from http:/ /www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/ catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=33934. Accessed Jan 2021.) with very little focus on policies and processes.

Thus, the purpose of this work is to address the gap in the quality assurance guidelines of online learning. These standards for online learning experiences, as a comprehensive set of criteria, are important to establish confidence in online learning among stakeholders and to facilitate structured and objective comparisons between various offered courses (Ahmed S, Hegazy N, Abdelmalak H. Model for Utilizing Distance Learning post COVID-19 using (PACT)™ A Cross Sectional Qualitative Study, in print BMC Medical Education.2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02311-10. Such standards and their indicators can also support the design of a guide for peer-reviewing and self-assessment for further improvement of online education.

This Quality Assurance Course Tool is based upon the Research Publication in BMC Medical Education (2021): Wasfy, N.F., Abouzeid, E., Nasser A.A., Ahmed S., Youssry I., Hegazy, N. N., Shehata, M. H. K., Kamal, D., and Atwa, H. A guide for evaluation of online learning in medical education: a qualitative reflective analysis.  
The tool provides quality standards and indicators in three main quality areas:  1) Organizational Capacity; 2) Learning and Assessment; 3) Human Resources.