Staff Training,Training

A Guide for Developing Effective Online Surgical Training Courses

The laboratory animal science (LAS) and biomedical communities are composed of globally dispersed members with various backgrounds, including undergraduates, graduates, postdoctoral students, and researchers with doctorates in philosophy, human, or veterinary medicine. All personnel within these communities who utilize animals are required to undergo basic animal biomethodology training. Additionally, in order for an animal study protocol to be approved, all personnel performing surgical procedures are required to be proficient in those surgical procedures. Unfortunately surgical training is not required by most institutions. Therefore, the majority of personnel become proficient in surgery by trial and error with little background instruction. One of the main reasons surgical training is not required is because it is not readily available, and those courses that do exist are expensive and time consuming. The number of surgical training courses currently offered is limited by a shortage of qualified instructors in the LAS community, especially those skilled in teaching rodent surgeries. These challenges can be partially overcome and addressed by offering basic surgical training online.

Electronic-learning (E-learning), also known as online learning, has been increasingly utilized within the human medical and surgical fields. E-learning has many benefits, including continuous access. This allows participants to schedule sessions around a busy workday and progress at their own pace, and can accommodate various learning styles. E-learning can also be used as an adjunct to live classes, where background material is introduced prior to a hands-on workshop. This increases the effectiveness of the workshop by allowing students to concentrate on gaining hands-on skills. Surgical E-learning allows surgeons to learn, review, and improve their skills. The interactivity of modules engages users. E-learning gives confidence to the students through immediate feedback and quick reference materials. Surgical E-learning has the potential to achieve standardization of basic principles and procedures by providing consistent content delivery and access on a global scale. Rapid advances in biomedical knowledge and technology can be continually incorporated into online lectures. However, E-learning should not eliminate human instructors, since human interaction is a vital ingredient to learning. Human interaction can be implemented into the E-learning experience through technologies like message boards, chats, e-mail, and teleconferencing. Translating the existing human surgical E-learning model to the field of surgical research provides researchers with the opportunity to learn basic and advanced techniques prior to using live animals.

These technologies would provide an excellent resource to the surgical research community.

The main challenge of E-learning,more specifically surgical online learning, is the lack of guidelines on how to develop courses. A Majority of institutions are learning that their faculty is unable to develop and implement an online course without the aid of a significantly large information technology staff.¹ Often, the personnel in the LAS and biomedical communities developing online programs lack online learning experience. This requires that they learn advanced computer skills such as website design,while attempting to create an informative and interactive course. This process can be frustrating not only for the developer but also for their supervisors and ultimately for the students. While this review outlines and briefly describes the steps involved in the development of an effective surgical online training course, it could easily be applied to the development of any E-learning course.