Technologies for improving laboratory learning in healthcare professions: the case of instructional video

Audiovisual cognitive artifacts in all their forms are increasingly used in flipped, blended, MOOCs and conventional teaching and learning processes. During the health emergency due to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, they were in many cases, in schools and universities, the only response to the need to follow up on training processes, which were compulsorily remote, becoming the educational media par excellence. This work concerns the use of educational technologies, specifically two audiovisual didactic texts, carried out in compliance with international multimedia design standards, to support conventional face-to-face didactic activities, in the field of professional health training (Laboratory for the simulation of radio-pharmacy activities, at the University of Ferrara, Italy). It is functional research to verify, on the one hand, the reinforcement of declarative knowledge (through a questionnaire administered in person immediately after the videos had been viewed) and, on the other hand, the perception of the effectiveness of the educational resources used (through a questionnaire administered online one week after the video had been viewed) for the reinforcement of procedural knowledge. All the instruments were administered to the entire group of students attending the degree course for medical radiographers (21 subjects), divided into two groups: the first group consisting of 11 subjects who still had to carry out the practical internship period; the second group consisting of 10 subjects who had already completed the internship. The final objective is twofold: (1) to contribute to the research area of video-based learning aimed at experimentally verifying the design principles underlying multimedia learning; (2) to verify the application of this methodology within laboratory teaching of medical degree courses and the health professions in order to meet educational needs in terms of improving the learning processes of complex manual procedures.