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Purpose: There are growing expectations that students graduating from health courses and current health professionals have some proficiency in using telehealth. However, there is limited accessibility to multidisciplinary-based material to meet this need. This paper describes the development of an online telehealth education resource using a co-design approach and the strengths and challenges of embedding authentic learning principles in an open-access online course with a broad target audience. Design/methodology/approach: The authors first describe the co-design process of the course and discuss the pedagogy underpinning the course design. Then learner enrolment data is discussed to evidence uptake across key characteristics. Finally, the authors assess the efficacy of the co-design approach by analysing feedback collected from learners at the end of the course. Findings: The course is structured across four modules and comprises interactive content, reflective tasks, case studies and purposefully developed digital material. Responses from the working group and from learner feedback indicate that the course is an authentic and relevant introduction to telehealth practice for both health students and current health professionals, despite some limitations. Originality/value: This case study demonstrates the value of a co-design process and key learning design choices in online course development to meet the educational needs of learners from broad disciplinary backgrounds, in various stages of learning/understanding of telehealth and/or requiring a practice-based resource in the context of a rapidly changing policy environment.

Health professional students must be equipped with the skills necessary to interact with patients. Effective interpersonal skills are difficult to both learn and teach, requiring development, practise and evaluation in both educational and clinical settings. In professions such as physiotherapy, traditional approaches to teaching these skills have encompassed clinical modelling, and stand-alone didactic teaching of the theory behind communication. These provide limited opportunity for students to practise and receive feedback on their interpersonal and communication skills. This paper describes the implementation of an experiential small group learning approach in an undergraduate physiotherapy program and discusses outcomes. Implications for practice are that: experientially based small group learning with opportunities for practise, reflection, self-evaluation and feedback, can improve students' confidence and interpersonal skills; consistent and scaffolded participation in experiential learning opportunities and assessment of this participation across the program is key to this approach. Interpersonal skills remain a challenge for new graduates; support and mentoring in this domain by supervisors may enhance the transition to work.

For many years, medical students at the University of Sydney undertook their clinical clerkships in traditional metropolitan teaching hospitals, which were regarded as the "gold standard" for clinical training. In 2001 the university established a rural clinical school at which increasing numbers of students now complete a significant proportion of their medical education. The aim of the study reported here is to examine students' perceptions of what facilitates their learning in clinical settings and to compare their perceptions across rural and metropolitan settings. Focus groups were conducted to collect students' views on their experiences of learning in clinical settings. The findings were used to generate a questionnaire with items designed directly from focus-group data ensuring content validity. The questionnaire was sent to all students in the 2004 cohort. Exploratory factor analysis was used to provide evidence of construct validity. The internal consistency reliability of the questionnaire was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Factor scores were computed to compare students' perceptions across the two settings. Four factors were extracted: (1) clinical teachers' orientation to teaching; (2) opportunities to develop clinical skills; (3) supportiveness of the clinical setting; and (4) student confidence and sense of self-efficacy. Students rated the rural experience more highly and positively than the metropolitan hospital experience with regard to all four factors. This study highlights the positive role that rural attachments can play in providing an educationally sound learning experience. The findings are important in the context of both the drive, among medical programs worldwide, to seek out additional and alternative settings for clinical education and the national agenda to foster student interest in rural careers through positive rural training experiences. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

Purpose: To develop a method for benchmarking teaching and learning in response to an institutional need to validate a new program in Dentistry at the University of Sydney, Australia. Design/methodology/approach: After a collaborative partner, University of Adelaide, was identified, the areas of teaching and learning to be benchmarked, PBL approach and assessment, were established. A list of quality indicators for these aspects of teaching and learning were first developed conceptually and then validated by the literature. Then, using a quality enhancement framework, levels of achievement for each indicator were developed. Findings: The findings are represented as a set of tables. These were mutually developed with the benchmarking partner and represent an agreed model for a benchmarking project to progress to the next stages of implementation and evaluation. Practical implications: This model can be adapted for any benchmarking project in all levels of education; primary, secondary, tertiary and continuing. Originality/value: The issue of benchmarking is high on the educational agenda, especially in higher education. The literature reports on a number of projects but with no clear explanation of a method for benchmarking. The fact that this model is evidence-based in its approach and that it focuses on learning and teaching, also marks it as original and a significant development in this area. (Contains 3 tables.)

Social accountability is a powerful concept. It is applied to medical education to encourage future doctors to take action to address health inequalities and overlooked health needs of disadvantaged populations. Problem-based learning (PBL) provides an ideal setting to teach medical students about these topics. The objective of this study is to explore how well the components of social accountability are covered in a pre-clinical PBL medical curriculum and to determine the usefulness of an adapted validated social accountability framework. We identified Irish health needs and social issues through a literature review. The retrieved documents were aligned to four values (relevance, equity, cost-effectiveness and quality) from a validated social accountability inventory, to generate a map of social accountability values present in the Irish health system and population. We then used the adapted validated social accountability inventory to evaluate the content of the PBL medical curriculum at an Irish medical school. We identified 45 documents, which upon analysis lead to the identification of health and social issues related to social accountability. 66 pre-clinical PBL cases included demographic, health and psychosocial issues similar to the local population. Analysing along the four social accountability values, the PBL cases demonstrated room for improvement in the equity and relevance domains. Topics for expansion are Traveller health, LGBTI health, alcohol use, climate change and more. Medical educators can use the paper as an example of how to apply this methodology to evaluate PBL cases. Adapting and applying a validated framework is a useful pedagogical exercise to understand established societal values related to social accountability to inform a medical curriculum. We identified opportunities to improve the PBL cases to depict emerging global and social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]