Assessment of Breast Cancer Patient Journey Open Access eLearning Material

Abstract

Every year, breast cancer affects millions of people worldwide, being one of the leading causes of death of women in developing countries. While some risk factors such as family history and age are identifiable, a significant portion of cases arise without clear causative factors. The journey of a breast cancer patient involves a number of health care professionals in different stages of the journey, and standardising their knowledge base is expected to enhance the multi-professional collaboration which is required to achieve the most optimal patient outcomes. Addressing this need for seamless multi-professional cooperation is the EU funded project EBreast II, in which a collaborative effort has been made to produce an open access eLearning platform with the aim to improve the understanding of the multi-faceted collaboration of health care professionals by means of harmonising the education and knowledge base of the students of relevant professions. The objective of this thesis was to evaluate the EBreast II open access eLearning material against the eAMK Quality Criteria for Online Implementations, which was specifically developed to assess the quality of eLearning material used in higher education, thus being fit for purpose in this thesis. The quality criteria consist of 11 different sections with 2 to 11 different criteria in each. The thesis was an evaluation research carried out by means of qualitative document analysis, where the eAMK Quality Criteria for Online Implementations Questionnaire was utilised to determine how well the eLearning platform fulfils each criterion. In the evaluation, it was concluded that the platform fulfils about two thirds of the criteria for high quality eLearning material and thus shows great potential for being a valuable resource for health care professionals and students in the future. However, the evaluation also revealed significant areas for improvement that need to be addressed in order for the eLearning platform to reach its full knowledge dissemination potential. These improvement areas were highlighted in the quality categories of interaction, guidance and feedback, development, and support services, where improvements should be implemented mainly by way of introducing some form of interactivity and opportunities for guidance and feedback, investing in continuous development of the platform and, perhaps most importantly, implementing robust support services to enable students to receive support both in technical and substance related issues. Addressing these shortcomings should increase the overall user satisfaction and engagement, thus promoting the overarching aim of the eLearning platform to harmonise the knowledge base of health care students and ultimately impact their professional behaviour. Finally, as research bias always poses a challenge in single-researcher studies, further evaluation could be considered to gain more subjective insights.