Nutrition Education And Interactive Communication Technology - Brief Article

Nutrition Research Newsletter, Nov, 2000

Changes occurring in health care, education, and technology are altering dietetics education in the new millennium. The downsizing that has taken place in many health care facilities has decreased the number and geographic location of preceptors and facilities available for dietetic internships. Researchers from Iowa State University investigated how communication technology can deliver dietetics education and training to nontraditional, diverse, and geographically dispersed students and facilities that have preceptor programs.

Contemporary students view knowledge and derive meaning in a style that is vastly different from the teaching traditionally used in higher education. In the past, the traditional lecture system covered material through teaching by telling. This approach, however, does not fit the preferred learning style of most of today's students. Distance education has been used in many ways in dietetics education, but predominantly in didactic programs, which are more instructor-centered, and include videotapes, correspondence, audiovisual conferencing, and online instruction. The Iowa State University dietetic internship has developed a diverse, versatile distance education technology program that incorporates cooperative learning directed by the intern, providing a chat room, bulletin boards, e-mail, and student tracking mechanisms.

Communication tools are imperative in promoting cooperative, interactive learning. For example, information about a clinical case study is divided into four pieces, and each intern receives only one piece of the information. They are assigned to a chat room where they are teamed up with interns from other facilities who have the remaining pieces of information to complete the case study as a team.

Each of three online modules consists of content pages that include text, graphics, glossary, hyperlinks to other Web sites, index, audio clips, animation, interactive calculators, video clips, and a patient simulation. The simulation provides feedback on the appropriateness of the intervention chosen by the intern and rationale for the preferred intervention. Two other institutions of higher learning with dietetics education programs similar to that of Iowa State University are testing the online modules during the 1999-2000 academic year.

The spring 1999 dietetic internship class at Iowa State University served as the pilot group for this project. The three modules included 42 computer pages of content, which were electronically hit 1885 times during an eight-week period. The interns spent an average of four minutes and 40 seconds on each hit; however, the average time spent on a page ranged from 16 seconds to 18 minutes. The group's comfort with the Internet improved significantly during the course of the internship. The mean test scores on quizzes developed by practitioners and researchers tended to improve during the course of the internship.

Given the opportunity, dietetic interns will use online instruction. Although interns have an appreciation for the role of computer technology in the profession, their comfort level can be improved through online instruction during the dietetic internship. A significant improvement occurred in comfort using the Internet during this pilot study. Overall comfort with computers may be significant with a larger sample size. Exit interviews conducted with the pilot group were positive and favorable toward use of online instruction in this dietetic internship program.

R. Litchfield, M. Oakland, J. Anderson, Improving dietetics education with interactive communication technology, JADA 100(10): 1191-1194 (October 2000) [Correspondence: Ruth E. Litchfield, Dept. of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Iowa State University, 1127 Human Nutritional Sciences Bldg., Ames, IA 50011-1120.]