Development of an e-learning environment with a user-centered design process: an example in the education of epidemiology and medical statistics

Epidemiological and medical statistical skills are essential for healthcare professionals to interpret research results, translate research to clinical practice and thus optimize healthcare. Therefore, these skills are crucial and should be an integral part of medical education. Epidemiological and statistical skills are commonly perceived as being difficult to teach and to learn. A potential solution may be the use of blended learning, which is a mixture of online learning and face-to-face class sessions. Compared to traditional face-to-face class sessions, blended learning has been related to more favorable user satisfaction and performance. We therefore developed an e-learning environment for epidemiology and medical statistics education for students in the faculty of medical sciences, that would be offered to students in combination with traditional face-to-face class sessions. In this paper, we describe the user-centered development process of our e-learning environment. To reach a comprehensive understanding and take into account the needs of the different stakeholders, we carefully identified the distinct stakeholders and their needs, followed by creating modules and videos. To account for the different learning styles that students may have, we also explicitly choose to use several different methods for learning so every student can optimally learn from our e-learning environment. By presenting the development process of our e-learning environment in this paper, we aim to inspire other lecturers, epidemiologists, statisticians and educational program directors to develop e-learning materials, and to support them in this process.