Cardoso, S.H.; Sabbatini, R.M.E.
Center of Teleneurosciences, The Edumed Institute for Education in Medicine and Health, Campinas/SP, Brazil
As brain sciences have shed light into many aspects of human behavior
and its disorders, interest of health science students in this area has
greatly increased, particularly in disciplines such as physical therapy
and education, speech therapy, psychotherapy and others. However, most
courses in these areas, particularly in developing countries, have poor
teaching programs in basic and applied neuroscience, with traditional
teaching approaches showing low levels of learning. In this sense,
neuroscience educators have asked fundamental questions such as how to
provide opportunities to health students to attend a neuroscience
course, and what kind of support environments and educational
strategies are more appropriate for a better learning in such area. One
important answer has been found with the integration of traditional
teaching and instructional technologies. The Center of
Teleneurosciences has the aim of developing new technologies applied to
teaching and learning in basic and behavioral neurosciences. In this
work, we describe our experience in the use of several strategies based
in active learning carried out via Internet or computers that may be
used to improve the teaching of neuroscience to health undergraduate or
post-graduate students. The main activities are as follows:1)
Interactive Virtual Lab of neuroanatomy; 2) highly participative
on-line neuroanatomy quizzes 3) virtual visits to university and labs
4) case-based learning. They have been able to provide students with a
more practical and interesting approach to neuroanatomy, such as the
application of theoretical knowledge to real situations (diseases,
experiments, media information, and scientific discoveries). This work
elaborates and implements a technology-based instructional design which
serves the educational needs of health care practitioners and
demonstrates its effectiveness and attractiveness via unstructured and
structured questioning of participating students.
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