Physical Therapy Education: The Feasibility of International Collaborative Assignments Using E-mail

Journal of Physical Therapy Education, Spring 2004 by Williams, Marie, Feldman, Robert

It was fun to interact with students from Australia, but honestly I really don't think it was that beneficial.

It would probably be better to do the assignment without the whole overseas e-mail-just do the case study and that's it.

Overall, the comments provided about the assignment content and style were insightful and positive. For example:

I'm glad I was able to participate in an international assignment. I understand that this is the first time this has been done. I think it has implications for being an interesting assignment. E-mailing was a little slow at times. It can be frustrating when you are waiting for a response. It may be because of low computer availability or a message not getting through for a number of reasons. Dates should be set, ie, you must respond by this date, or I'll know there is a problem. Other than that, it's been fun.

I thought this project was quite rewarding. N was extremely interesting (the content and structure) and learning about different insurance policies and physiotherapy fees was particularly intriguing.

This project was very interesting in that we were able to learn differences in treatment styles. It was also useful in accessing insurance information. It was a challenge communicating over the Internet-it took longer. Overall, very interesting.

Unlike a previous study8 that investigated the use of e-mail as a means of developing cultural awareness In nursing students, computer literacy was not perceived to he a major difficulty in completing this assignment. It appears that the cohort of students participating in our study were generally very confident with their ahilities in information technology, with a minority indicating that they had difficulty accessing information through the lntranct (21%), were concerned with electronic security (13%), or that their information technology skills had improved as an outcome of this learning task (13%). However, it is interesting to note that only a minority of students agreed that communicating via e-mail was easy (15%), and this is more likely to reflect an expectation of immediate or timely responses between group members rather than an inherent difficulty with e-mail as a communication medium.

Huang12 contends that adult learners need a learning environment thai provides real-world case-based environments for the development of meaningful and authentic knowledge. One of the time-consuming and frustrating aspects of professional physical therapist practice is the reimbursement for sendees provided cither directly by the patient or via an insurance company. Exposure to this real-world requirement is often neglected during physical therapist education, and the majority of subjects in our study confirmed that prior to this assignment, they were not aware of the cost of insurance issues for clients receiving physical therapy (63% agree and 17% neutral) and, very much like professionally practicing physical therapists, found that accessing information from Insurers was not necessarily easy.