1 Online Education, University College of Estate Management, Reading, UK.
2 Clinical Pharmacology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Menoufia University, Egypt.
Glob Health Promot. 2018 Sep;25(3):74-76. doi: 10.1177/1757975916680970. Epub 2017 Jan 30.
Developing countries are suffering from increasing burdens presented by both non-communicable and emerging infectious diseases. Health education is an important step to fight against these mostly preventable diseases. E-learning has been shown to be one of the tools that address some of the training challenges experienced in developing countries by supporting efficient content delivery, decreasing costs and increasing access. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent innovative presentation of online learning that have attracted millions of learners from all over the world. In this commentary, we propose MOOCs as a potential tool to offer a tremendous opportunity to fulfil the unmet training needs of the health sector in developing countries in two complementary ways: as a resource for training healthcare professionals; and as a resource for the general public. Potential barriers to accessing MOOCs and possible solutions are also discussed.
发展中国家正面临着不断增加的非传染性和新出现的传染病的负担。健康教育是对抗这些大多可预防疾病的重要步骤。电子学习已被证明是解决发展中国家培训挑战的工具之一，通过支持高效的内容传递、降低成本和增加获取途径来实现。大规模开放式在线课程（MOOCs）是在线学习的一种新的创新形式，已经吸引了来自世界各地的数百万人参与学习。在这篇评论中，我们提出 MOOCs 作为一种潜在的工具，可以通过两种互补的方式为发展中国家卫生部门未满足的培训需求提供巨大的机会：作为培训医疗保健专业人员的资源；作为公众的资源。还讨论了获取 MOOCs 的潜在障碍和可能的解决方案。
