Development and evaluation of an ODL course on Medical Image Processing

Recent developments in the field of Biomedical Engineering have led to considerable improvement in health care delivery, but also impose continuous change and improvement in education and training schemes of its professionals, in order to assure appropriate front-line knowledge, competencies and skills. Open and distance learning provides a very effective means for continuous education and training purposes. Image processing may be used as an attractive case for exploring the Collaborative Learning Model (CLM) paradigm in Open Distance Learning (ODL). An on-line course on Medical Image Processing, following the principles of collaborative learning, has been developed and evaluated. Each concept of the course is available in three levels of complexity. The first level shows only a very general description, actually the main idea. If the user is interested to continue, a second level is accessible, where the concept is explained in a more detailed manner. Moreover, for some concepts requiring complicated mathematical proofs, a third level is available. The course has been used at the European Course on Biomedical Engineering organized by the Department of Medical Physics, University of Patras, Greece, and was positively evaluated by the students.