Challenge

The Bower Foundation is a non-profit organization that works to promote health and medicine in the state of Mississippi. They wanted to create a new eLearning platform to educate medical students and professionals alike about the importance of breastfeeding to infants and how to communicate this information to new and expectant mothers in a professional setting. They turned to DDA to create a platform that would serve as an inter-professional education platform for students in the state of Mississippi, as well as a continuing medical education (CME) platform for students and professionals in the state, with CME students accessing the platform through their existing LMS.

Objectives

Using a wealth of information on breastfeeding from Mississippi's own experience, the eLearning platform would use hours of original role-playing video along with slides featuring text and images synchronized to voice-over animation. Both pre- and post-course testing would be included to measure improvements in knowledge on breastfeeding topics as the learners progress. IPE users would receive a certificate of completion, and CE users would be returned to their learning management system from the platform to receive their CE credits. Metrics reporting woulld be included to offer more granular insight into learning outcomes. Intended to be the first of a series of eLearning modules, the Breastfeeding module needed to make a strong impact to ensure continued support from The Bower Foundation and Mississippi colleges and universities.

Solution

DDA worked with The Bower Foundation to develop the custom design for the new web eLearning platform. The platform is branded with the name Inspire Health, the name The Bower Foundation chose to specifically represent its new eLearning outreach initiatives. Administrators of the eLearning platform are able to create and manage schools, which manage the registration process for IPE users. Each school is associated with a specific email domain, and those that register on the platform must have an email address with that domain to gain access, ensuring that only Inspire Health partner colleges and universities have access to the eLearning content. School management also includes the ability to set a specific user as an administrator for the school, so those administrative users can review metrics reports on only those in their school. For CE users, DDA worked with Inspire Health's LMS provider to program a seamless flow from their LMS to the custom Inspire Health Breastfeeding eLearning platform. The Inspire Health platform accepts registration information from the external LMS to populate its own database. Once the user completes the course, the learner's passing status (if achieved) is sent back to the LMS so the learner can obtain their official CE credit from that platform.

The course content is divided into five cases. Each case consists of original eLearning content including slides that DDA synced to voice-over narration, original role-playing videos showing medical professionals speak to new and expectant mothers (with the final case video showing new mothers share their experiences with each other), references to external online resources for more information, and short question-and-answer action stops to increase engagement.

The first four cases each have a pretest and posttest of 5 – 7 questions. Users must achieve 70% on each posttest to be considered passing, and 70% on all posttests to achieve certification on the course as a whole. Users get one attempt on each pretest, and two on each posttest. On the first posttest attempt, if users get a question wrong, they are told it is wrong and provided a reference to the specific section in the course that will reveal the answer so they can correct their response in their second attempt (if needed). On the second attempt, if they are wrong they are provided the correct answer with an explanation to help reinforce the weak area of their understanding of breastfeeding. Users must also fill a short, 10-question module evaluation before obtaining their certificate to provide insight on how the course is received by learners.

The administrative side has extensive reporting features. Individual performance metrics show the percentage correct each user achieves on each pretest and posttest as well as the course overall, the time spent on each specific case and the course overall, each user's demographic information they entered during registration (including student or professional status, age, gender, race, educational attainment, and more), and each user's response to the 10-question module evaluation, which includes an area for free responses.There are also global performance metrics, individual test response reports, and global summary test response reports. Additionally, top-level administrators can filter all these reports for specific schools, and ach report is divided into IPE and CE users. To protect privacy, The Bower Foundation administrators see de-identified reports on individual performance, while school administrators are able to see the names of each student. Additional expanded reporting capabilities are being planned.

DDA also provides web, database, and streaming media server hosting for the Inspire Health eLearning platform, with streaming media being hosted on DDA's Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for optimal video performance to all users regardless of geography.