A Multimedia Educational System to Teach Epidemiology

An educational system has been developed which consists of a module to help both teachers to design courses with different levels of knowledge regarding epidemiology and students to get acquainted with the field of epidemiology. The software development product Director was used to develop the software application. The capacity required to install the software is 130MB although each individual component is not greater than 1.2 megabytes in order to facility its handling. The user interface of the system employs colour, text, complementary voices and animation. Moreover, exercises have been designed to facilitate the learning process and to allow students and teachers to interchange information with it. The system has been evaluated by a number of 65 students both graduate and undergraduate. Half of them were attending the undergraduate course in Nursing. The rest were graduate students attending a Masters Course in Health Informatics and Health Management. The first group of students had some prior knowledge of Epidemiology. The latter group had different levels of knowledge (none, little prior knowledge or an intermediate level of knowledge), of Epidemiology. The scope of this research is to prove the efficiency of Multimedia in teaching the rather difficult subject of Epidemiology.