Michelle Lee encapsulates the core values and worldwide impact of Physiopedia at a ER-WCPT platform presentation.
As this is being written Michelle is stood on the platform in Liverpool for her presentation titled “A review of the effectiveness of using wiki to support educational projects internationally at undergraduate and post graduate levels”. Michelle is heavily involved in the creation of the courses on Physiopedia and she does fantastic work.
The educational courses have been running on Physiopedia for years now and aren’t just accessible to those enrolled on the course at the time. Low resource communities utilise these courses and is incredibly valuable to them. Institutions from the US, Belgium, Scotland and England are all involved and this is ever growing.
Michelle performed semi-structured interviews alongside questionnaires to evaluate the effectiveness and fulfillment from the course leaders and the students across all projects. Overall the feedback was excellent with 100% of institutions reporting reaching their pre-course aims and wanting to continue their project partnerships.
3 themes emerged from thematic analysis of the interviews; experiences, technology and development. The experience featured heavily with the students as at they felt intimidated at the start of the courses due to technological concerns but at the end they felt incredibly proud of what they achieved as well as very competent, in fact many returned years later to update the content. Understandably there is a steep learning curve but overall short lived.
Overall the development of the students was profound as the really excellent work students create are permanent and available for the world unlike paper single-copy dissertations which inevitably end up sat on a shelf collecting dust. The course leaders even went as far as to say that the learning was better with a wiki based project as with a traditional piece of work. The students thoroughly enjoyed the projects through consistent engagement and ‘a game changing experience’
Several things to work on were highlighted with areas to improve such as with multimedia content, mobile device optimisation and some concerns over the peer-review process. All of these areas of development are known to the Physiopedia team and are being addressed thanks to Michelle’s work.
Long after her presentation was over Michelle sparked ongoing conversation about the importance and versatility Physiopedia can offer. Make sure you get your opinion heard on social media @physiopedia @physiospot as well as Facebook.
Let’s continue to improve global health through universal access to physiotherapy knowledge.
Michelle is currently undertaking her advancing physiotherapy practice masters degree at Manchester Metropolitan University, find out more about her here. Make sure you take a look at her latest work on the Knee Course which is ongoing over on PP+.