Dissemination of Best Practices in Preterm Care Through a Novel Mobile Phone-Based Interactive e-Learning Platform

Objective: To describe an innovative interactive e-learning method to disseminate knowledge to larger group of participants over a wide geographical area.

Methods: The course material included standard training tool "Best Practices in Preterm Care," hosted on Telegram, a cloud-based instant messaging platform. The participants were enrolled in the group created on Telegram by the facilitators and included in-service nurses from India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and UAE. They were mentored by 62 facilitators over 10 wk. Content of each module was loaded every week on two specific days. Mentors specified for that week facilitated learning through discussions. There was a live session every week to address any additional queries and to summarize the key messages of the week. Each week ended with weekly assessments through quiz.

Results: In this course, 4623 nursing professionals from India and Southeast Asian Region involved in providing neonatal care, participated. There were 9939 posts with an average of 126 posts per day. Majority of the participants felt that the topics were relevant (~95%) and they were comfortable in asking questions and could clarify their doubts (~90%). Majority rated their overall experience as very good to excellent (~98%).

Conclusions: Interactive e-learning using the current approach if channelized optimally seems to be acceptable and feasible method to reach wide geographical area. This, however, needs local champions ready to mentor their own health professionals with context-specific guidance.