A curriculum-based approach to teaching biosafety through elearning

Abstract

Anyone working in biosafety capacity enhancement faces the challenge of ensuring that the impact of a capacity enhancing activity continues and becomes sustainable beyond the depletion of funding. Many training efforts face the limitation of one-off events: they only reach those people present at the time. It becomes incumbent upon the trainees to pass on the training to colleagues as best they can, whilst the demand for the training never appears to diminish. However, beyond the initial effort to establish the basic content, repeating capacity enhancement events in different locations is usually not economically feasible. Also, the lack of infrastructure and other resources needed to support a robust training programme hinder operationalizing a "train-the-trainer" approach to biosafety training. One way to address these challenges is through the use of eLearning modules that can be delivered online, globally, continuously, at low cost, and on an as-needed basis to multiple audiences. Once the modules are developed and peer-reviewed, they can be maintained on a remote server and made available to various audiences through a password-protected portal that delivers the programme content, administers preliminary and final exams, and provides the administrative infrastructure to register users and track their progress through the modules. Crucial to the implementation of such an eLearning programme is an approach in which the modules are intentionally developed together as a cohesive curriculum. Once developed, such a curriculum can be released as a stand-alone programme for the training of governmental risk assessors and regulators or used as accredited components in post-graduate degree programmes in biosafety, at minimal cost to the government or university. Examples from the portfolio of eLearning modules developed by the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) are provided to demonstrate these key features.