News Alert! Take part in the Health Professions Global Network discussion on Health Sciences Online- A new online learning tool
This discussion is organized and moderated by Prof Erica Frank, the Director of Health Sciences Online and Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
The discussion is hosted by Health Professionals Global Network, WHO and partners and supported by the Knowledge Gateway.
The discussion will run for three weeks, beginning Monday, 21 June, and ending on Friday, 9 July.
The first week of the discussion (Monday 21 June to Friday 25 June) will introduce you to the resources available through Health Sciences Online. During the second week (Monday 28 June to Friday 2 July), we would like to discuss future plans and projects, and how you can guide and participate in the development of this accessible health sciences university. The third week (Monday 5 July to Friday 10 July) will wrap up what was learnt from your contributions and suggest next steps and how you can help to make HSO an online learning tool that best-suits your training needs.
How will the discussion work?
Each week you will receive a maximum of two email messages. In the first email, Dr. Frank will give a brief overview of the weekly topic and pose several topic-related questions. The second weekly email will be a digest of the week’s discussion, summarizing commentary received from you and responses by Dr. Frank and her team.
To participate in the discussion, send your message to hpgn@hpgn.org. You can also visit the Health Professionals Global Network Community page online to access related resources and tools, as well as an archive of the discussions, by logging into http://hpgn.org.
For this first week, we invite you to visit HSO (www.hso.info) and browse through it.
Let us know what you think:
1. How is it a useful tool?
2. How can it be better?
3. What questions do you have?
4. Do you have materials or topics that you would like to suggest that we add?
Background
Do you know the challenge of finding the right health information at the right time?
Health sciences information and training are vital for health development, but excellent, free learning resources are difficult to find. In recent years, information and communication technologies, particularly the Internet, have been central to remedying this situation. But there are still significant hurdles to accessing online content. There is an enormous need to identify selective, current, accessible online educational and training resources.
Physicians and other health scientist volunteers from around the world have developed an innovative approach to tackle this problem and would like to let you know about it: Health Sciences Online (www.hso.info)
What is HSO ?
For now, HSO is a virtual learning center with browse and search functions. (We’ll tell you more next week about where HSO is heading.)
HSO provides free, online linkages to a comprehensive collection of top-quality courses and references in medicine, public health, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, basic sciences, and other health sciences disciplines. Currently, HSO gives access to more than 50,000 resources, hand-selected by physicians and other HSO experts, from accredited educational sources including universities, governments, and professional societies. It is now freely used by more than 6,000 health professionals in training and practice (and others) around the world every day.
HSO is supported by a number of founding collaborators and funders, including the CDC, NATO Science for Peace, World Bank, WHO, and the World Medical Association.
We look forward to hearing YOUR opinions, experiences, ideas.
If you have any questions or problems, please send an email to hpgn@hpgn.org. We look forward to this discussion and your active participation!
Best wishes,
HPGN Team