Resumen

LOZADA MARTINEZ, Ivan David; BOLANO ROMERO, María Paz; TORRES LLINAS, Daniela Marcela  y  ARROYO SALGADO, Bárbara Julia. Massive open online courses for continuing education: a tool for health students and professionals. Rev. cuba. inf. cienc. salud [online]. 2022, vol.33  Epub 30-Jun-2022. ISSN 2307-2113.

Massive open online courses have become an exponentially growing pedagogical strategy in the last decade. They have been categorized as the next evolution of network learning, with the capacity of breaking the barriers toward academic training, fostering theoretical and practical skills in all areas of knowledge. The purpose of this study is to present evidence of the usefulness of online courses for the comprehensive development of medical students and health professionals. A non-systematic search was conducted of the literature on the topic published in the databases PubMed, Science Direct and EBSCO on any date until October 2020, using search terms such as “health personnel”, “health occupations students”, “distance education” and “massive open online courses”, as well as their synonyms, combined with the operators “AND” and “OR”. Massive open online courses on health topics may be a strong, effective strategy to encourage a massive worldwide educational change aimed at mitigating the needs currently posed to the world. Education being the main tool to achieve social growth, if access to knowledge is reinforced among the most vulnerable populations of all age groups, it may be expected that self-care and healthy lifestyles will become a priority for all human beings, thus contributing to improve morbidity and mortality rates and reduce health care costs.

Palabras clave : massive open online courses; continuing education; health education; distance education; training of health human resources; health students; health personnel.