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The Bower Foundation is a non-profit organization that works to promote health and education improvements in the state of Mississippi. They decided it was time to use eLearning to expand their impact on health care in the state, and partnered with DDA Medical for the design and development of a new medical eLearning platform that would teach both medical students and professionals about Breastfeeding. Multimedia content centered on a series of original live role-playing videos and slide decks sychronized to voice-over narration, while also including action stops designed to punctuate the course content with active involvement from the learner with question-and-answer segments and information reveals. The platform would be built on DDA's original learning management system (LMS), customized to the exact specifications The Bower Foundation required for this project. The new eLearning platform would be branded as an Inspire Health Interprofessional Education platform, Inspire Health being the new brand entity representing The Bower Foundation's reach into eLearning.

 

The course content is divided into five cases representing the major subject areas, with four of the five cases including pretests and posttests that help gauge the growth in understanding about key breastfeeding topics taught by the original eLearning platform. Users are given two attempts on each posttest. Wrong answers on the first attempt are followed by feedback directing the learner to review the specific video or slide deck in the course that includes the correct answer to the question, while a wrong answer on the second posttest attempt is followed by a confirmation of the correct answer. The unique testing structure helps learners strengthen their areas of weakness in the material, while also giving Inspire Health valuable insight into users' growth in understanding attributable to the eLearning course.

 

 

The Inspire Health platform functions both as an Interprofessional Education (IPE) module as well as a Continuing Education (CE) module. IPE users register on the platform directly using an email address from one of about twenty qualified Mississippi colleges or universities. To ensure security, upon entering a qualifying email address, a registration link is sent via email to that email address which allows new IPE users to register on the platform and begin the course. The schools are managed from the back-end administrative area, where each school is named and its qualifying email domains are identified. The school administration also lets administrators indicate which educational programs are available at that school, which can then be selected from a dynamically populated drop-down menu during registration. CE users are able to access the course through the common LMS used at one of The Bower Foundation's partners, the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Some of their registration information is prepopulated from the LMS, with additional details filled out during the time of first access from the LMS. Both IPE and CE users receive a personalized certificate of completion upon passing the course, which IPE users can use to show to professors to confirm their completion of a course requirement. When CE users successfully complete the course, they are given a code they can use to obtain CE credits, and a token is passed to the LMS to indicate that they have passed the course.

 

 

DDA Medical developed an innovative back-end administrative area for management of the platform and an extensive range of metrics reports. In addition to the school management features described previously, each school has a designated school administrator who can log in to review reports only on their students. The platform allows master administrators to populate the list of educational programs that the schools each use to populate their own registrations. The reporting is extensive. Global on-screen metrics show administrators the number of total users, the number who have completed the course, and the average total pretest and postttest scores. On-screen individual performance metrics show the exact time spent on each case and the overall course, the scores on each pretest and posttest, answers to module evaluations, and the demographic information of every single user on the platform. Adminsitrators from The Bower Foundation see the individual user metrics de-identified for privacy concerns, while school administrators also see the names. There are also a variety of spreadsheet reports, including for global and individual performance metrics, module evaluations, the exact answers each user gave to each pretest and posttest, and the total number of users who selected each multiple choice answer for each pretest and posttest. Additionally, all reports can be filtered by school, filtered to show just HighMarksCE users, and spreadsheet reports are issued in two, with IPE and CE users separated into their own reports.

 

The Inspire Health Breastfeeding eLearning platform was quickly adopted into the curricula of many of The Bower Foundation's college and university partners and was received to high acclaim by the board, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and medical students and professors throughout Mississippi. Following the success of the Breastfeeding platform, Inspire Health would then work with DDA Medical to produce a new eLearning module on health insurance in the U.S., as well as create a separate Breastfeeding eLearning platform for users outside of Mississippi that is open to all. DDA Medical also plans a third eLearning module for early 2022 focusing on nutrition, exercise, and metabolic health. The Inspire Health Breastfeeding eLearning platform shows what a positive impact can be made when high quality multimedia content is combined with innovative interactivity in engaging eLearning platforms that advance the state of the art in online education.