Effectiveness of blending E-learning with field trip on Chinese herbal medicine education: quasi-experimental study

• Published in: BMC complementary and alternative medicine 2020-08, Vol.20 (1), p.248-248, Article 248
• Main Authors: Li, Lei, Tam, Chi Wing, Wang, Ning, Cheung, Fan, Zhou, Qing, Zhang, Cheng, Cheng, Chien-Shan, Xiong, Lei, Feng, Yibin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blended learning; Chinese herbal; Chinese medicine; Computer-Assisted Instruction - methods; Distance learning; Drugs, Chinese Herbal; E-learning; Education; Education, Medical, Undergraduate - methods; Educational Measurement; Female; Field trips; Herbal medicine; Hong Kong; Humans; Knowledge management; Learning; Male; Materia Medica; Medical education; Medical personnel training; Medicinal plants; Modules; Online education; Online instruction; Problem-Based Learning; Program Evaluation; Prospective Studies; Quasi-experimental methods; Questionnaires; Students; Surveys and Questionnaires; Traditional Chinese medicine; Training
• ISSN: 2662-7671; 2662-7671; 1472-6882
• DOI: 10.1186/s12906-020-03034-y

Chinese Medicine education is part of professional medical training in Hong Kong. An important element of this is herbal medicine, which requires both theoretical and practical knowledge. A field trip programme was adopted to provide students with direct experience of medicinal plants studied in lectures. However, problems with the current programme were identified in learning outcome assessment and long-term knowledge management. To improve the teaching quality, a Moodle e-learning module was designed for augmentation. This study aimed to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of the Moodle module in supplementing the current field trip programme. Prospective quasi-experiment. Participants were 49 year-2 students in the Bachelor of Chinese Medicine programme. A Moodle module including five online activities regarding two groups of herbal plants was integrated before and after the field trip. Fill-in-the-blank questions were used to assess the learning outcome. Also, a questionnaire was developed to collect student feedback as the secondary outcome. For herbal plants in Group A, the assessment score was higher in Moodle group (29.65 ± 5.0) than for the control group (21.65 ± 6.5) (P