The virtual ISPOG Academy: how E-learning can enrich (our) society

Cultural changes and scientific progress requires health care professionals (HCP) to update their knowledge continuously and keep their practical skills state of the art. In order to do so we all make use of learning objects like scientific journals and evidence-based guidelines. For psychosomatically oriented professionals however, for whom education is more than transfer of mere knowledge, this is useful but not enough.

When ‘schooling’ is also involved, i.e. when professional attitude, communication, cooperation and other more reflective competences are at stake, journals and guidelines provide a too limited medium. Psychosomatic teaching requires didactical support in terms of rich illustrations, video material and, best of all, interaction, discussion and feedback. That is exactly why our congresses are so popular, where experts express all these extras in their oral presentations, clinical lessons and workshops.

This social or constructive way of teaching and learning unfortunately has one major flaw. After a few days the scientific community breaks up and the only noticeable traces in collective history are formed by the abstracts. Reductionism at its worst! And no matter how well the interaction at the moment of presentation was stored in individual memories, they lose their impact with impressive speed over time.

In order to fill this gap, the editors in chief of this journal, supported by the board of ISPOG, would like to propose a new initiative: the virtual Academy for Psychosomatic O&G. This Academy offers the opportunity to publish and thereby share and preserve as much as possible of our collective wisdom, including its rich narrative expressions.

In the October meeting in Venice an extra session will be held, based on this initiative. Here we will limit ourselves to sketching some of the basic backgrounds of this virtual academy.

1. Aims: To publish and share educational learning objects, like presentations (preferably on video) and visualisations (PowerPoint presentations), tutorial systems including the opportunity to work with multiple choice questions, reflection assignment and off course goal based scenarios. In this latter case, students/users take on the role of the HCP, they are embedded in a cover story (often starting with a video case) and are challenged to make a diagnosis and to propose a management strategy.

2. Content: Psychosomatic O&G is a broad domain which is difficult to describe in strict terms. Bitzer [1] has published a proposal for an international course, which provides some useful guidelines.

3. Procedure: Teachers present their contribution to the Editorial Board, preferably as ‘frame-based lessons’. The concept of frames, offering a bit of information (starting point is often a case) followed by questions and or assignments to elaborate on certain aspects of the problem, is a very efficient strategy to transfer information.

4. Governance: The responsibility of the academy lies in the hands of ISPOG, but is delegated to an Editorial board of the JPOG. This board at its turn makes use of its dedicated pool of reviewers and representatives.

5. Technical platform: The technical platform will be hosted on a free of charge basis by a non-profit organisation: the Ahmas Foundation in the Netherlands ( www.instructie.ahmas.nl ). Both editors in chief are member of the board of this foundation.

6. Technical support: Ahmas will also provide technical support to enable members to upload their contributions in a proper way.

On behalf of the editorial board and the ISPOG, we hope to meet you all in Venice and to join forces to get the Academy started!