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User Movies as a Means of Incorporating the Knowledge and Experience of Users in Web-based Professional Education

Combining video clips with forum discussions is a useful strategy in web-based distance learning. This article documents experiences from a project where specially recorded ‘user movies’ were used as a means of incorporating a user perspective in a web-based course on maintenance treatment of opiate addiction. User movies can help solve two common pedagogical challenges in distance learning. Firstly, the high dropout rate, which to some extent is connected with the fact that distance-learning students tend to feel lonely and isolated. The second challenge concerns the task of combining theory and practice in distance-based professional education. A description of the process of making the user movies, which were produced in cooperation with individual users, is followed by a discussion of some examples of how they were used on the course. The user movie concept was sparked by practices in the field of problem-based learning and other case-based methods. The article concludes with a discussion of the results of the course evaluations. The experiences from the project show that movies and discussions can serve as an effective means of supporting learning processes. The model with user movies has great potential for other types of distance-learning-based professional education.