Washington DC, 16 November 2021 (PAHO) - The Virtual Campus for Public Health of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) presented the Initiative to strengthen trainers’ capacity to design and manage virtual courses, during a webinar, on 16 November 2021, organized in cooperation with the University Institute Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This initiative seeks to support the development of trainers’ capacities in virtual education through the production of open access educational materials for public health trainers that can accompany and strengthen educational practices within Virtual Campus and in any educational institution in the health sector.
“PAHO's commitment is to strengthen the Virtual Campus to bring new knowledge, guidelines, norms, and PAHO standards to health workers in the Region,” said James Fitzgerald, director of PAHO´s Department of Health Systems and Services, during the opening of the session. "Therefore, we need trained trainers, PAHO´s teams who know how to build the appropriate courses and acquire the necessary skills to bring knowledge to health workers in the Americas,"
The materials were developed through an agreement with the University Institute Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires and include guidance on the following topics:
- Coordination of virtual courses
- Tutoring of virtual courses
- Evaluation and feedback of learning in virtual proposals
- Design and development of activities on virtual platforms
- Development of virtual course programs
- Coordination of virtual synchronous meetings
- Institutional management of self-study courses
All materials are of open access and available on the Virtual Campus in Spanish and English, in a space specially designed for trainers’ training.
The Virtual Campus also presented the recent publication of the “Educational Approach of the Virtual Campus for Public Health. General considerations and pedagogical criteria to develop virtual educational proposals”.
“This publication seeks to guide the different PAHO officials responsible for managing projects in the Virtual Campus and the governments, ministries, institutions, and organizations that are part of the country's nodes, about the educational approach of the PAHO Camps Virtual”, said Gabriel Listovsky, Virtual Campus’ Coordinator.
An educational approach is a conceptual and methodological framework that explains, guides and anticipates educational processes and outcomes. In this case, it is the general framework that supports training interventions in the field of public health.
"The educational approach of the Virtual Campus will accompany the work within the Organization and with the institutions of the Region of the Americas in the ongoing training of human resources from the perspective of health systems and services," added Listovsky.
