Abstract Virtual reality has long existed, but its wider adoption in education is recent. Studies informed by theoretical underpinned co-creation frameworks and utilization of theoretical informed evaluations are scarce in literature. Thus, this study internationally evaluated the efficacy of three virtual reality reusable e-resources (VRReRs), co-created based on the ASPIRE framework, for teaching clinical skills to university students. The study followed a mixed-methods approach, combining SUS, SUS Presence Questionnaire, TAM, and UTAUT2 with a focus group discussion. Additionally, for one VRReR, a quantitative pre/post evaluation of knowledge and comparison with lecture notes followed. Results demonstrated moderately to highly usability, effectively facilitated a strong sense of presence, confidence while using them, and willingness to continue using VRReRs in the future, while increased knowledge of the learners, highlighted their effectiveness. Although some usability issues were identified, these were considered easy to address. This work evidence, in an international context, that co-created VR resources are highly acceptable and effective, similar to other types of digital or traditional resources developed through participatory inquiry paradigm. By leveraging the benefits of VR technology, VRReRs have the potential to transform and enhance the learning experience in the field of clinical skills, ultimately advancing the digitalization of higher education.

There is growing need for intelligent digital support in healthcare, business, industry, indeed all domains. Learners in any domain need educators/experts to provide knowledge and guidance by relaying relevant and timely information. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as chatbots or conversational agents, can support information delivery. However, user-centric frameworks for designing chatbot learning applications and collaborative user-centric design methodologies are lacking. This paper describes a chatbot design tool to promote co-creation through crowd-based data collection and design. This prototype has the capacity to be used as a structured method of design and data collection through cocreation for healthcare, education, and beyond.

Cybersecurity attacks in healthcare have evolved towards social engineering and human-based intervention, showing increased frequency and success of such attacks. Increased priority and resources towards human factors training can reduce cybercriminal opportunity in healthcare. A cybersecurity workshop, developed following the ADDIE model, allowed frontline healthcare workforce and nursing students to increase their knowledge and confidence abilities against windows of opportunity for cybercrime. Participants confidence in cybersecurity skills use in daily practice significantly increased while participants knowledge showed a positive tendency. A list of actions for enhancing the cybersecurity in healthcare training is discussed as guidance for current and future curricula.

Virtual Reality (VR), blanket term used for all the reality-virtuality spectrum, is exploding in proliferation, especially in healthcare. The core challenge of this explosion is the timely and cost-effective provision of bespoke content. Co-creative approaches can facilitate this endeavor by making the educators active participants in the development process reducing development overheads and democratizing healthcare digital content creation. This panel session aims at health educators, VR technologists, developers and technology enthusiasts. It will present, and actively engage its audience with co-creative methods and approaches, providing them with the gateway experience that could become useful for introducing such methods in their institutions and workflows. The panelists are cross-disciplined educational technologists/medical educators with extensive experience in the field of technology enhanced learning (TEL) who have implemented such methodologies in practice. The workshop will follow a mixed format. A brief “observations from the field” introduction to the topics of VR TEL and co-creation will be followed by an introduction to real world healthcare VR projects and resources. In these, realistic examples, the participants will engage in hands-on storyboarding and non-technical design and development tasks, in order to acclimate with the co-creative process and become able to explore it for their own use cases.

The papers in this special section focus on the challenges faced in the digital healthcare market. Recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), as well as biomedical engineering, sensor technology and data science, have acted as catalysts for significant developments in the sector of health care, strongly affecting medical diagnosis, patient and healthcare management, disease treatment and health education. In fact, small wearable, disposable sensors, implantable devices or medical devices, as well as elementary services are being featured as keys for monitoring health and facilitating well-being.

The inclusion of information and communication technologies in Healthcare and Medical Education is a fact nowadays. Furthermore numerous virtual learning environments have been established in order to host both educational material and learners online activities. Online modules in a VLE can be designed in very different ways being part of different types of courses, while different models can be used to design the course based on what the creator aims to achieve. Thus, the types and the importance of the different elements of the online course may vary a lot. At the same time the need of a global approach to gather big educational data in order to provide valid meaning to the data through learning analytics and educational data mining is urgent. In order this to be achievable we propose a Learner Activity Taxonomy in which the different elements of the learners activity data can be categorised and a Learner Engagement Framework in which the importance of the different elements is vital in order for an analysis of the big educational data to provide a meaningful result. The initial application to practice of the Taxonomy and the Framework are presented based on data from 3 modules at 2 Universities, while the impact of them along with its limitations are discussed.

Highly proficient eHealth health IT professionals assure health care and public health, while healthcare professional workforces should have the eSkills needed to make optimum use of their available eHealth health information technology. Addressing IT skills for healthcare workforce is seen as an important element of achieving greater social inclusion. Thus, in this paper we propose a framework for a social network based registry where the users (healthcare workforce), the institutions and the policy makers could, collaboratively shape the required IT skills and competences for each healthcare profession. At the same time, all knowledge created at the registry could be shared through the semantic web and linked with existing silos of knowledge.

Web 2.0 is the web of collaborating and sharing, where all users have the chance to create, publish and share content. Thus there are two important effects. There is an overload of the information on the web and the trustworthiness of the sources is uncontrolled. In the health domain, access to harmful information could be controlled. To reach this goal we propose a Health Information Recommender System to connect videos with trustworthy information from very trustful medical sources, such as Medline Plus. According to video's data, this system detects the main topic of the video and enriches it with information from very well-known resources. Evaluation results reveal that the method using SNOMED CT terms to identify relative information is the most appropriate as the main method of the Health Information Recommender System.

In the current explosion of internet technologies and exponentially increasing usage of the web there exists a need for effective searching and retrieval of information and resources. This is particularly true in medical and health care education. In the mEducator EUC funded project (www.mEducator.net), the collbaorators are attempting to develop technologies that will enable the above notion by means of multiple technological approaches, including one based on Web 2.0 principles and mashup technologies, and another based on web 3.0 and semantic (or linked) services. In this paper we view this problem through the recent notions of persuasive technologies and we explain how these are taken into account in the problem of metadata completion, a necessary action for linking resources in open educational repositories or learning management systems. The basic principles of persuasive technologies taken into account together with their application in the above field are explained and demonstrated with examples.

Educational content is often shared among different educators and is enriched, adapted, and, in general, repurposed so that it can be reused in different contexts. This paper discusses educational content and content repurposing in medical education, presenting different repurposing contexts. Finally, it proposes a novel approach to content repurposing via Web 2.0 social networking of learning resources. The proposed social network is augmented by a graphical representation module in order to capture and depict the relationships among different repurposed medical educational resources, based on educational resource "families" and inheritance. The ultimate goal is to provide a conceptually different approach to educational resource organization and retrieval via "social" associations among learning resources.

Digital resource sharing is a contemporary trend in Medical Education. State-of-the-art digital resources are incrementally appearing in the majority of curriculums worldwide. Institutional repositories have been initiated and metadata descriptions of digital resources have been turned into standards, however sharing, retrieval and re-use across different institutions are still at infant stage, due to the lack of appropriate tools and the cost of metadata creation. To this extend the aim of this paper is to propose a user-friendly editor for the creation of Healthcare Learning Object Metadata (H-LOM), an ANSI standard by MedBiquitous, to enhance the educational sharing and retrieval of digital health resources.

Medical education requires a learning environment that enables medical students to acquire knowledge in a ldquohands onrdquo and organized way. This, in turn, requires that content can be accessed, evaluated, organized and reused with ease by the students. Social Software (i.e. Weblogs, Wikis, ePortfolios, Instant Messaging) and Semantic Web technology could play an important role in such learning environments. Where Social Software gives users freedom to choose their own processes and supports the collaboration of people anytime, anywhere, Semantic Web technology gives the possibility to structure information for easy retrieval, reuse, and exchange between different systems and tools. In this article a very specific technology that combines Social Software and the Semantic Web, that is Semantic Wikis are presented, together with their possible role in medical education Moreover the first Medical Semantic Wiki in Greek Language and its use in medical education are illustrated.

During the last two decades, the scene in education is rapidly changing by the deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Smart classes, virtual classrooms, online collaborative educational experiences and emerging WEB 2.0 applications are increasingly used, either as stand alone or blended with conventional education. Additionally, as emphasis is shifting from dasiateachingpsila to dasialearningpsila, technologies that promote active, participative learning, such as computer based audience response systems, are employed in order to enhance students' participation and explore their degree of understanding. This paper presents our approach in combining online active learning and active learning in class in the case of medical education.

As technologies of information and communication are integrated incrementally with all facets of everyday life, it is reasonable to expect a penetration into educational procedures as well. This is also true for the case of medical/health informatics. In this paper, we describe our approach to facilitate the provision of online medical informatics modules with all those tools (Moodle) and standards (SCORM, HealthcareLOM) required, so as to allow for a proper electronic provision of our modules. The effort is made against the traditional and ineffective concept of simply converting the classical learning material into its corresponding digital form; it is rather attempted here to fully follow the whole educational process by trying to achieve the educational objectives and learning outcomes in parallel to creating and structuring the digital material. Web 2.0 technologies are also incorporated into this process.

Cervical cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in women around the world. The primary underlying cause is infection with high risk type(s) of the human papillomavirus (HPV). In this paper, a framework of developing an e-learning platform with standardized educational material about prevention of uterine cervical cancer and management of precancerous lesions is provided. As technological evolutions during the last decades along with the appearance of international educational standards affect incrementally every facet of education, numerous medical courses will have to be implemented online, and in compliance with SCORM. This paper outlines the efforts undertaken within the Medical School of AUTH to provide such e-courses to GPs. The main conclusion drawn from the first pilot evaluations indicate that learners are capable and ready to use such e-learning technologies.

Continuing medical education tends to be considered compulsory in most countries although it is described by the Union of Euro pean Medical Specialists as an ethical duty. Accreditation of CME and allocation of credits is not yet mandatory in the EU but it is important for providers of educational activities to meet certain quality criteria so as to be prepared for future requirements. Many software platforms and learning management systems (LMS) can be used to support Web-based courses for online CME. Certain standards like SCORM, define the set of specifications that enables cross-system workflows. Updates and extensions of SCORM specifications enable further enhancements. The current research proposes a framework for the accreditation of online CME courses through the enhancement of the SCORM model and the use of metadata, using a SCORM-compliant open source LMS platform, namely, moodle. The model assumes the definition of learning objects and learning outcomes for a specific target audience of the course and the design of an instructional module incorporating several types of learning material.

Communication, collaboration and exchange of information between health units via the internet have been thoroughly discussed and many web systems have been proposed. However, little work has been done at patients' transportation using web-based technologies. We propose a web-based system which provides an e-platform for patient transportation between health units in the same country as well as in different countries, taking into consideration the cross-country legal framework for patient transportation. To this extend, the system prototype is tested for the case of cross-border patient transfer between Greece and Bulgaria.