Analysing healthcare professionals' interprofessional learning experiences in an asynchronous text-based environment

Abstract

Information on student online learning experiences from a student perspective is considered by many educational researchers as invaluable indicators of the effectiveness of online modules or programmes. Methods to gather the information are commonly based on either a phenomenological or an ethnographic approach. For research studies which focus on the healthcare professionals' interprofessional online learning experiences in an asynchronous text-based learning environment, Fairclough's version of critical discourse analysis (CDA) may offer researchers a more insightful account of the student online learning experiences. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how some pertinent information about students' interprofessional online learning experiences which are likely to be missed in existing approaches can be recovered via CDA. The main aim of this chapter is to exemplify the importance of research work which sets out to determine the effectiveness of interprofessional online learning from a student's perspective to start focusing on culture and social relations. While this chapter aims at providing researchers an alternative research approach which can establish the student learning experiences of interprofessional online learning from a student perspective, more crucially, it does so within an authentic learning environment. By using some data of an ongoing research project, the messages created by a group of healthcare professionals in their course of online interprofessional learning are picked apart to demonstrate how CDA can offer researchers further insights to the student online learning experiences than those offered by existing qualitative approaches. © 2011 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved