1.​​​Background

Since COVID-19 and its associated vaccine only emerged very recently, healthcare curricula have not previously incorporated education on this subject and so the subject area is relatively new for many healthcare professionals and healthcare trainees who are not trained COVID-19 vaccinators. Healthcare professionals, healthcare educators, and healthcare trainees hold positive attitudes towards online learning^[1]  and digital approaches to learning are now mainstreaming in health education. Advantages of online learning include flexibility, self-pacing, catering to different learning styles and reducing resource costs associated with time, travel, and trainer availability. With the urgency of COVID-19 vaccine (including booster vaccine) rollout globally, the overall aim of this study was to rapidly develop and test an internationally relevant, multimedia e-learning package providing education about the COVID-19 vaccine for health and care workers (and trainees), in order to facilitate global promotion and uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines.

The research question was: Does this digital training package improve users’ knowledge and confidence for promoting the COVID-19 vaccine and/or lead to changes in behaviour around vaccine promotion?

2. Reusable Learning Objects

3. ASPIRE Methodology

A rigorous design and development approach for materials is important: a clear, simple, and consistent conceptual model will increase the usability of a system and support widespread uptake and use of digital resources. Therefore, development and testing of the RLO was undertaken using ASPIRE methodology (Figure 1) which is a well-used and validated tool for RLO development and an approach that is suggested to fit optimally with requirements for designing high quality digital training in healthcare. ASPIRE methodology uses participatory co-design principles and is centred on developing a ‘community of practice’ of experts and potential future users who work together at each stage of the process, to identify learning needs and create content supported by instructional designers and multi-media developers.

Figure 1. ASPIRE methodology for CoVE package development.

ASPIRE has a six-step process  including: (1) establishing the aims of the RLO, (2) storyboarding, (3) populating/production, (4) integration, (5) release, and (6) evaluation, which we aligned to the New World Kirkpatrick Model. ‘Aims’ refers to the need to have a clear focus for the resource. This includes the topic area to be covered or learning goal, and the characteristics of the target group of learners. ‘Storyboarding’ is where stakeholders come together to work creatively on ideas for the content and design of the resource using storyboards. ‘Populate and Produce’ is where the ideas are translated into media components ready to be ‘integrated’ together using a suitable platform such as HTML5. ‘Release’ relates to how the resource will be made available to learners via a virtual learning environment (VLE), repository, or website, for example, and how will it be promoted. The final stage, ‘evaluate’ is determining the efficacy of the learning resource in a real learning situation.

Two synchronous consultations with members of the target audience identified the support need and established the key aim for the RLO (Step 1, 2 groups: n = 48). Asynchronous storyboarding was used to co-construct the content, ordering, presentation, and interactive elements (Step 2: n = 14). The project team populated the content template and produced relevant graphics and media (Step 3, n = 3). This was integrated into a RLO template through a technical development process. Both content (specification) and technical (media) development were undertaken by the project team (n = 3). Two-stage peer review of content and technical presentation was undertaken (Step 3: n = 23).

The final RLO was uploaded to HELM Open (https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/helmopen/ (accessed 17 December 2021)) and released in May 2021, with evaluation data collected via an embedded survey, and post-training qualitative interviews.

TOur evaluation showed that the COVID-19 Vaccine Education (CoVE) training package ^[2] increases users’ knowledge and confidence in communicating with patients, clients and the general public about the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine for individual and societal health. CoVE is internationally relevant, and timely for distribution to health and care professionals and healthcare trainees during the COVID-19 pandemic. HWe recommend that healthcare organisations and educational facilities widely distribute CoVE to facilitate global promotion and uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines. While CoVE has shown to be globally relevant and provides a wealth of additional evidence-based resources, in certain contexts the training could be delivered alongside additional materials that are tailored to the concerns of motivations of specific cultural groups, or the package could be distributed by trusted members of community groups. The package content has high value at the time of this study but will need to be periodically reviewed and updated. This is because the pandemic’s trajectory (and the response to it) will evolve, vaccines will be more widely distributed, the extended period of media coverage may raise additional questions, and post-vaccination surveillance data will provide greater insights over time.

The CoVE package is open access on HELM Open: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/helmopen/rlos/practice-learning/public-health/CoVE/ (accessed on 17 December 2021).

Read more at IJERPH: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/2/653/htm