Distance education is increasingly being used to teach a wide range of topics to various health care professionals. Since 1960, distance education has been used in several instances and has trained professionals who have demonstrated improved knowledge scores and performance in their workplace once they completed the program.
There is a critical lack of skilled health professionals in India and unfortunately leaving home, family and their work to attend training courses is not a viable option for currently practicing health professionals. As a response to this challenge, the implementation of distance education program has increased so that students can easily access the programs from any location in India.
What is Distance Education?
Distance education refers to the learning situation where the instructor and the learner are geographically separated and rely on electronic devices or printed materials for instruction delivery. It requires the students to enroll with an educational institution that offers lessons prepared in a sequential and logical order and upon completion of each lesson, the assigned work is corrected, graded and commented.
The main advantage of distance education programs is that the learners can easily learn at their own convenience, thereby accommodating their work and personal life.
How distance education helps healthcare professionals?
Distance education has been used to offer medical training to healthcare professionals or doctors since 1960. Though the objective range from teaching topics to pre-medical students such as health services administration to training nurses and etc. Most of the experiences are limited to areas of health education and training. To meet the diversified and emerging needs of health workers, some programs and courses have to go beyond medical graduates.
Some main advantages of distance learning are that it helps the healthcare professionals to fit their learning around their work and home life. Learners:
- Learners can decide as to when and where they can study
- They can set their own pace of study
- They are not restricted by geo locations, and you can get a degree from anywhere in the world
- It is economical and also less time consuming
- It offers a lot of flexibility and the learner can design his own schedule to learn and work simultaneously.
Having well trained and competent health professionals is the goal of any organization, but traditional training has various limitations. Distance education has helped to offer alternative training approaches that address the basic tenets of quality in healthcare.