Concentrations: Health Professions Education

The Health Professions Education concentration is designed to assist individuals to gain knowledge and skills necessary to teach and train students, clients, patients, and health care consumers in the health care setting.  Different teaching strategies are presented for the delivery of instruction in the classroom, clinical sites, and the community.  These strategies include lecturing techniques, discussion, demonstration, problem-based learning, computer-assisted learning, personalized instruction, independent learning, and a variety of other methodologies.  Students  learn how to develop curriculum, courses, lesson plans to deliver instruction and how to construct assessment instruments such as tests and observation tools for evaluation of performance.  This concentration will prepare students to become either didactic or clinical educators of health professionals at community colleges, universities, health care organizations, technical schools, community health organizations, and diagnostic corporations. All of the courses necessary to complete this program are available by web based distance learning.

Student Outcomes

Graduates will be prepared to:

• serve as faculty and/or educational administrators in health professions programs at academic institutions and practice sites.
  
  
• understand, evaluate, analyze, and utilize different learning methods, teaching strategies, and models of instruction to develop programs, courses, and lessons in the didactic and practice components of health professions education.
  
  
• evaluate and differentiate the roles, duties, responsibilities, special skills, and the educational and experiential qualifications of health professions faculty at academic institutions and practice sites.
  
  
• measure and evaluate the practice and didactic competencies related to the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains through the selection and/or development, validation, and application of test instruments.
  
  
• evaluate the philosophies, principles, and practices of health professions education and develop curricula which integrate didactic and practice components that reflect the needs of the dynamic health services community.
  
  
• conduct and evaluate research to improve health professions education.