Some aspects of the quality of the open-access internet educational

Popularity of Internet-resources among medical school students has grown significantly. In preparation for their classes, the future medical doctors read not only textbooks and lectures but also make wide use of the Internet. Online educational resources developed on the basis of Web 2.0, for example, YouTube, Wikipedia, and social media networks are particularly interesting. This tendency, however produces some concerns among the medical teachers due to the perceived poor quality of many of the educational materials published on these web sites. This article presents a review of foreign publications in English for the last five years that have analysed some aspects of the quality of open-access medical educational resources published on the websites YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter. The quality of these resources that could serve as additional learning materials as well as some quality criteria were analysed . Together with the small amount of research of this kind, the authors of many of these publications pointed out the significant variability in the quality of the resources that the students use in their unsupervised study and in preparation for their classes. Both total quantity and quality of the learning resources depended on the field of medicine to which they were related. The areas where the resources were deemed to be of good quality was in materials related to cardiology (in particular pathophysiology of the cardiovascular diseases) and neurology. To analyse quality of the resources, most authors used their own criteria or those of leading world clinics. As the authors of the publications stated, a part of internet learning materials could be recommended as tutorials, some other parts, however contained mistakes and / or were dangerous for the patients. Thus, most learning videos on electrocardiography, a patient’s general physical examination, and some aspects of the intensive care contained some inaccuracies. After the analysis of medical articles in Wikipedia, the researchers pointed at their generally low quality and recommended editing of such publications as a learning activity for the students. After a search of the publications on the quality analysis of the posts in some general social networks, very few publications were found to be relevant. In addition, the researchers state that among many medical articles on the internet, finding good quality articles is very difficult. Moreover, there are some concerns about the professionalism of the authors of such medical posts and the authorship itself often is difficult to establish. In these conditions, the creation of online libraries of open-access learning resources is necessary, as well as teaching students evidence-based practices and methods of evaluating medical publications found on the Internet.

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