Teaching in virtual environments: a guide to innovative teaching - 2021

The pandemic reimagined the ways of working, teaching, learning, and meeting around the world. Since March 2020, with the emergence of COVID-19 and social distancing, we have all witnessed and participated in the increase of virtual communication at all levels.

Regarding educational processes, there was an “outbreak” of proposals and various online activities, aimed at offering alternatives to the traditional education of new professionals, to support the training and education of the health workforce, to acquire resources to face the emergency and to train teachers to accompany all these processes.

In its permanent mission to improve accessibility to public health education and bring knowledge closer to practice, the VCPH proposed to support the development of training capacities in virtual education, through the Initiative to strengthen trainers’ capacity to design and manage virtual courses.

Within the framework of a work agreement with the University Institute of the Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires, seven open access materials have been developed for public health trainers that can participate in and strengthen educational practices within the VCPH, but also from any educational institution in the health sector.

These materials include guidance on the following topics:

• Coordination of virtual courses
• Tutoring for virtual courses
• Evaluation and feedback of learning in virtual proposals
• Design and development of activities on virtual platforms
• Development of virtual course programs
• Coordination of virtual synchronous meetings
• Institutional management of self-paced (self-learning) courses

The materials are free and open.

We invite you to be part of this Network of virtual teachers.