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• The Program's objective is to enhance the knowledge and skills of health care professionals to meet the public health preparedness and emergency response demands resulting from acts of bioterrorism and other incidents.

Distance Learning

Introduction

We have studied the effectiveness of commercial communication services to support both synchronous and asynchronous forms of interaction within the context of delivered course content. We are working in partnership with the Institute of Emergency Management ISU Boise to leverage their existing Learning Management System, the Idaho Preparedness Learning Management System (IPLMS), which is hosted and managed by Meridian Knowledge Solutions, Inc. At the level of text-based communication, the IPLMS can easily be configured to support searchable threaded-discussion lists for all the courses we provide. Discussion lists have proven very effective as a social learning medium where instructors can interact with students and students can support each other in their own time.

The Institute of Rural Health routinely uses higher end Tandberg based teleconferencing systems for weekly interactions between partners across Idaho and less frequently for Virtual Grand Rounds. However, this mode of teleconferencing has required significant investments both in equipment and bandwidth access. In order to provide teleconferencing opportunities for students from whatever bandwidth they have access to (minimum 28 kbps) and using minimum grade PC based equipment with a low cost noise cancellation microphone(~$20) and up web camera (~$19), we have expanded our spectrum of teleconferencing technologies to include web based conferencing tools.

Webconferencing

A number of IBAPP courses will involve live lectures and Webconferencing facilities to sustain two-way interactions. All the sessions will be recorded and warehoused so that this archive can be accessed at the convenience of the student. We evaluated a number of web conferencing solutions that included Macromedia Breeze™, WebEx™, Microsoft NetMeeting™ and Elluminate Live™. The selection criteria included their ability to adapt gracefully to a range of bandwidths including bandwidth as low as 28 kbps, their pricing schemes, their user interfaces, their ease of integration with Learning Management Systems, their ability to hold under heavy loads up to 500 concurrent users and the complexity of the required workflow for recording and archiving webconferencing sessions. Most webconferencing applications also provide desktop and application sharing functionalities, integrated polling and quiz management applications. In addition to providing courses where instructors will interact with students directly, the courses can also include PC based simulations that can run on the more power machines of the instructors and be accessed by students on lower end hardware from their homes. Our evaluations lead us to select Elluminate Live™ (Figure below) to support our webconferencing needs.

Elluminate Live™ webconferencing application with integrated desktop and application sharing functionality

Hybrid Distance Learning and Face 2 Face