Hager Khechine

Use of health-related information from the Internet by English-speaking patients:

The aim of this research is to determine the kinds of health-related information that patients seek more often from websites written in English, and at which stages of the healthcare decisional process they use this information more intensively. A quantitative study was performed. Canadian English-speaking patients who have long-term diseases and who use the Internet completed an 18-item questionnaire online. Respondents were questioned about the categories of health-related websites they visit the most (scientific, general, commercial websites, or discussion groups) and the stages of the medical decisional process during which they use the information obtained (identification of possible treatments, treatment choice, and treatment application or follow-up). Results show that respondents use Internet information displayed in English mostly at the stages of identification of possible treatments (94.2%) and treatment application or follow-up (86%). At these two stages, patients look more often for information from scientific websites.

A Comparative Study on the Effectiveness of Podcasting in Distance Learning

This paper describes a study which aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of podcasting technology in teaching online courses. A sample group of 104 students, with an optional access to audio recordings (podcasts) of the course, completed an online questionnaire. Some ANOVA tests were done to compare the group of students who listened to the online recordings (33) with those who did not (71). The results of the study indicate that the students who listened to podcasts demonstrated more effective learning, greater satisfaction, more participation activities, greater autonomy and better motivation than those who did not.