Technical evaluation of the mEducator 3.0 linked data-based environment for sharing medical educational resources

mEducator 3.0 is a content sharing approach for medical education, based on Linked Data principles. Through standardization, it enables sharing and discovery of medical information. Overall the mEducator project seeks to address the following two different approaches, mEducator 2.0, based on web 2.0 and ad-hoc Application Programmers Interfaces (APIs), and mEducator 3.0, which builds upon a collection of Semantic Web Services that federate existing sources of medical and Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) data. The semantic mEducator 3.0 approach It has a number of different instantiations, allowing flexibility and choice. At present these comprise of a standalone social web-based instantiation (MetaMorphosis+) and instantiations integrated with Drupal, Moodle and OpenLabyrinth systems. This paper presents the evaluation results of the mEducator 3.0 Linked Data based environment for sharing medical educational resources and focuses on metadata enrichment, conformance to the requirements and technical performance (of the MetaMorphosis+ and Drupal instantiations)

Setting priorities for EU healthcare workforce IT skills competence improvement

A major challenge for healthcare quality improvement is the lack of IT skills and knowledge of healthcare workforce as well as their ambivalent attitudes towards IT. This paper identifies and prioritises actions needed to improve the IT skills of healthcare workforce across the EU. 46 experts, representing different fields of expertise in healthcare and geolocations systematically list and scored actions that would improve IT skills among healthcare workforce. The Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative methodology was used for research priority-setting. The participants evaluated the actions using the following criteria: feasibility, effectiveness, deliverability, and maximum impact on IT skills improvement. The leading priority actions were related to appropriate training, integrating eHealth in curricula, involving healthcare workforce in the eHealth solution development, improving awareness of eHealth and learning arrangement. As the different professionals’ needs are prioritised, healthcare workforce should be actively and continuously included in the development of eHealth solutions

Medical Education Escape Room Aligned with Flipped Classroom and Powered by Mobile Augmented Reality

Medical education escape rooms are emerging as a viable technological resource for pedagogy-first, learner-centric educational activities. This work presents the evaluation results of the first flipped classroom implementation in medical education, thus utilizing a mobile-driven augmented reality (AR) escape room. A total of 21 first-year medical students attended a flipped classroom educational activity that aimed to acclimate the students with the workflows of basic life support. Knowledge acquisition and user perceptions were evaluated. Knowledge acquisition was evaluated with an ad hoc relevant instrument at three timepoints: (a) baseline at recruitment, (b) preclass after students had prepared for the episode, and (c) after class. Learner perceptions about the activity and the AR escape room were recorded at the activity’s end using a previously designed evaluation instrument. The results demonstrated sufficient knowledge acquisition only after completing the whole educational activity, while learners found the experience interesting, and the AR escape room challenging, thus reflecting an activity that was well formulated in structure and content. The challenges identified were the limited out of class collaboration capacity of the digital application and the highly gamified approach that at points counteracted the educational scope of the activity. Overall, these positive initial results demonstrate the potential of collaborative, escape based, activities for self-directed, learner-centric medical education

Are Females More Responsive to Emotional Stimuli? A Neurophysiological Study Across Arousal and Valence Dimensions

Men and women seem to process emotions and react to them differently. Yet, few neurophysiological studies have systematically investigated gender differences in emotional processing. Here, we studied gender differences using Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and Skin Conductance Responses (SCR) recorded from participants who passively viewed emotional pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The arousal and valence dimension of the stimuli were manipulated orthogonally. The peak amplitude and peak latency of ERP components and SCR were analyzed separately, and the scalp topographies of significant ERP differences were documented. Females responded with enhanced negative components (N100 and N200), in comparison to males, especially to the unpleasant visual stimuli, whereas both genders responded faster to high arousing or unpleasant stimuli. Scalp topographies revealed more pronounced gender differences on central and left hemisphere areas. Our results suggest a difference in the way emotional stimuli are processed by genders: unpleasant and high arousing stimuli evoke greater ERP amplitudes in women relatively to men. It also seems that unpleasant or high arousing stimuli are temporally prioritized during visual processing by both genders

Mathematical Anxiety influences the cortical connectivity profiles in lower alpha band during working memory tasks

Highly math-anxious (HMA) individuals are characterized by a strong tendency to avoid math, which ultimately undercuts their math competence and forecloses important career paths (Ashcraft, 2002). It is hypothesized that worries and intrusive thoughts associated with math anxiety (MA) reduce working memory resources needed for cognitively demanding math tasks (Chang & Beilock, 2016). However, mental processes that access the memory representations of mathematical knowledge has not been fully uncovered (Ashcraft, 2001). Previous studies indicate that the frontal cortex is dominantly involved in working memory (WM) and more specifically while updating the working memory representations (Smith & Jonides, 1997). Additionally, Klados et. al. 2015 show that higher event-related potential (ERP) measures of HMA subjects are predominantly located at frontocentral sites at cortex, while performing WM tasks. Here, we aim to explore the changes in cortical connectivity profile induced by MA during WM tasks