Delivering Distance Training to Rural Health Care Professionals

Abstract

This article reports on a project that delivers distance training to rural health care professionals. Traveling to provide training on information-seeking skills to rural health professionals is time consuming and costly. In addition to face-to-face training, the University of South Alabama Biomedical Library's SAMNet project seeks to deliver multimedia training to rural health care professionals. The project uses information technology to package training courses combining PowerPoint slides and video instructions. This article describes the rationale, training module design and development, and the information technology and software used in the project. Multimedia packaged distance training courses provide a practical alternative to on-site training for rural health care professionals. It enables librarians to provide training without traveling long distance, thus saving time and money. Additionally, rural health care professionals may access the modules at a time convenient to them and proceed at a pace suitable to their learning style.

Key Words:

• Distance education
• information technology
• information-seeking skills training