Blended learning for teaching cell culture as part of DMU e-Parasitology.

Abstract

Emerging and re-emerging human parasites have become a global health threat due to different factors including globalisation, climate and vector ecology changes that have highlighted the necessity of teaching human parasitology to appropriately train future health care professionals. However, a significant erosion in the teaching of parasitology in conjunction with a reduction of the number of parasitology departments across European universities has been reported. To maintain and strengthen the teaching of this discipline, De Montfort University (DMU, UK) is leading an innovative international project for the development of a complete on-line package for teaching and learning parasitology named dMu e-parasitology. This package will be publicly available on the DMU website here http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/ when completed early in 2019 and have different modules including a Virtual Laboratory. This paper focuses on the first e-learning unit created for the Virtual Laboratory section, named Human Cell Culture, and the validation undertaken to use it as a model unit to build this section. Cell culture is fundamental in parasitology for supporting different areas such as culture of obligate intracellular parasites or testing future drugs against these pathogens. The evaluation of the unit with undergraduate Biomedical Science students in 2017/18 at De Montfort University (UK) indicate that the unit seemed successful in facilitating students to acquire essential basic skills for working with cells in a cell culture room. Finally, we also provide a description of the short-blended learning experience implemented to validate the unit, intervention that could be easily adopted to enhance the teaching of cell culture in human health science programmes.