An innovative approach to facilitate critical thinking and reflective learning in prescribing and therapeutics e-learning

Abstract

A fully online and standardised national curriculum for prescribing education, National Prescribing Curriculum (NPC), is offered to students of multiple health disciplines in Australia. The NPC consists of 28 self-paced one hour modules based on World Health Organisation’s Guide to Good Prescribing. Health professional education requires didactic teaching to be blended with interactivity, problem solving, critical thinking and self-reflection. The NPC offers the students flexibility and interactivity and increases their prescribing knowledge to help them solve relevant problems. Going forward, there is a need to enhance the teaching capabilities of the module by facilitating critical thinking and reflective learning. In this paper, we discuss an innovative approach of embedding certainty based multiple choice questions in the NPC modules to facilitate critical thinking and reflective learning in a highly demanding learning environment and present the results of a study to evaluate the usefulness of this approach.