[Questionnaire study on the acceptance of a student initiative for computer-based medical education]

Computer-based teaching and learning are getting more and more important in medical education. To integrate this type of training into the curricula, medical faculties must provide supervised computer labs. The present study was conducted to evaluate the acceptance and efficiency of the student-organised concept of computer labs established at the Charité Hospital in Berlin.

An electronic online questionnaire comprising 25 items was distributed to all users of the two computer labs at the Charité to ask their opinions about the quality of the student-organised concept and their satisfaction with the working conditions in the labs and to compare them longitudinally with the results obtained 4 years ago.

A total of 1275 users worked in the labs during the survey period and 702 answered the questionnaire (return rate: 55.1%). The users assigned good to very good ratings to different components of the concept with student self-administration and helpfulness of the student tutors achieving the highest rating (both 1.5 +/- 0.7). In the longitudinal study no component of the concept was rated worse in the current questionnaire, whereas the opening hours were assigned significantly higher ratings than 4 years ago (1.6 +/- 0.8 vs. 2 +/- 0.9; p < 0.001). Over 20% of all users stated they would be interested in actively participating as tutors in the project. Students used the computer labs for a mean of 3.1 hours per week. The support of students working on a voluntary basis allowed for weekly opening hours of the labs of 146 hours with the personnel expenditure costs that would be necessary for the position of one faculty member.

The good to excellent ratings, the high acceptance by users, and the low costs of the project presented here suggest that this student initiative can be recommended to other medical faculties to serve as a basis for integration of computer-based education into the curriculum.