TRADITIONAL EDUCATION AND/OR DISTANCE LEARNING AS A CHALLENGE TO MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW - OPINIONS OF PHYSIOTHERAPY STUDENTS

The dynamic development of modern information technologies entails the need for updating methods of education at university-level schools. The main goal of university education should be to optimally prepare students to undertake employment in the global society, which has recently been turning into an information society. One way of refining traditional teaching approaches to meet the demands of an information society is by enriching these traditional methods with approaches making students more active players in the learning process, such as distance learning, blended learning, or e-learning. These methods serve to enhance learning flexibility as students can now choose where they want to learn, at what pace and for how long, and they can also choose from among a variety of forms of educational activities. The following article presents the advantages and disadvantages of e-learning and points out the need to adjust teaching approaches based on modern IT methods to the specifics of studying Physiotherapy. The article also presents preliminary results of a pilot survey of 125 Physiotherapy students of the Medical University of Warsaw (104 women, students of Bachelor and Master programs, average age of 23.5 years, SD = 1.72; min. 20; max. 30) in 2011. An electronic questionnaire was posted online on a Google server. The majority of respondents (83.2%) had heard of online learning but only 3% had participated in e-learning before. The students' self-assessed level of knowledge about this training method averaged 2.86, on a scale from 2 (poorest score) to 5. In the opinion of 86.4% of the respondents, e-learning primarily consists in imparting knowledge to students, while 67.2% of participants perceived it as training students in searching for information, and 28% of students believed that the Internet enables academic teachers to monitor students' progress. A total of 71% of respondents declared their willingness to participate in online classes during their Physiotherapy programs at the Medical University of Warsaw.