K. Jackson1
1Physiopedia, London, United Kingdom
Background: Open access educational resources and digital health-related platforms have a prominent role in the education of students, patients and clinicians (Cronin 2018, Coughlan et al. 2015) A wiki-style platform such as Physiopedia can be an effective tool for enhancing students’ learning by promoting evidence informed practice and professional digital skills. Content development projects involving students as content editors have been contributing to the growth of Physiopedia since its creation in 2009.
Purpose: To describe how university content development projects have contributed to the dissemination of physiotherapy knowledge to the global community.
Methods: Google Analytics website tracking software was used to report the number of yearly page views and average time Physiopedia site visitors spend on the pages created by two content development projects. The University of Nottingham Spinal Rehabilitation Project was initiated in 2013 and forms part of the first Spinal Rehabilitation module in a three year undergraduate physiotherapy course (BSc Hons). Students in this project revise an existing page or create a new page that relates to spinal rehabilitation. The Queen’s University Neuromotor Function Project began in 2017 and forms part of the curriculum for first year students in a two year Master of Science in Physical Therapy (MScPT) program. In this course the students work in groups to create pages related to neurological conditions that affect adults.
Results: Between Feb 1st 2013 - June 30th 2020 students in these two content development projects have created and/or revised 63 pages including 1,536 references to relevant evidence. The pages created by these two projects have been viewed 1,379,425 times since their creation. The average time users spent on these pages was 4 minutes and 41 seconds. The top three visited pages from the University of Nottingham were: Manual Therapy Techniques for the Lumbar Spine (31,404 unique pageviews per year), Sacroiliac Joint Special Test Cluster (23,584 unique pageviews per year) and Red Flags in Spinal Conditions (19,602 unique pageviews per year). Queen’s University's top three pages were: Wallenberg Syndrome (13,628 unique page views per year), Action research arm test (10,985 unique page views per year) and Unilateral neglect (10,055 unique page views per year).
Conclusion(s): Through content development projects such as the University of Nottingham Spinal Rehabilitation Project and the Queen’s University Neuromotor Function Project student physiotherapists have the opportunity to creatively collaborate to contribute to an open resource that is accessible to rehabilitation professionals and patients from around the globe. The value of the created articles and the contribution to the global profession is evidenced each year by the large number of users seeking out the information provided on these pages.
Implications: The use of collaborative content development projects in higher education can provide students with a unique learning opportunity that also supports the dissemination of evidence-informed content.
Funding, acknowledgements: No funding was awarded for this project.
Keywords: Educational resources, virtual platform, physiotherapy, rehabilitation
Topic: Education: methods of teaching & learning
Did this work require ethics approval? No
Institution: N/A
Committee: N/A
Reason: Addresses unique developments in continuing education
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
