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Information technology in nutrition and dietetic education

The increase in pressures of teaching in tertiary education has led to a need to consider new methods to support the learning experience for students; for example, in a single faculty of a university, a survey has shown that there were 173 different innovations in teaching methods that were being tried and 14% of these involved information technology (Ellington & McIntosh, 1995). Since the development of the computer, it has become a growing influence on the workplace for nutritionists and dietitians, so clearly information technology has been incorporated into the teaching programme as a subject. In addition to these more obvious uses of computers by professionals, computers can also be used to help in the teaching of non-computingrelated subjects. While teachers of nutrition may be pleased to allow computing staff to develop separate units for information technology, few may themselves consider the application of information technology in the support of their own teaching. I have developed several different approaches that illustrate the range of possible uses of computers as aids to teaching; I incorporated all of them into the teaching of second year Nutrition and Dietetics students. A search of the education literature from 1976 to 1997 failed to find any study in which a wide range of information technology was employed at the same time in the support of teaching; there are, however, many reports of individual programs and their evaluation in a wide range of subjects, including nutrition (Kolasa & Miller, 1996). Thus, at the end of the year, before examinations, students were asked to complete a questionnaire about information technology; each question was made in the form of a statement with potential scores 1-7 from one extreme idea to the opposite, for example disagreement to agreement (this type of evaluation is known as the illuminative model; see Knussen et al. 1991). Each program was evaluated by students in terms of simplicity of use and the extent to which it helped them. Other questions were asked about whether timetabled hours should increase and about use of the programs outside classes. There were also general questions relating to the use of information technology and the students’ attitudes to computers. The scores for all the questions regarding the simplicity of use were summated, as were those asking about how helpful the programs had been. These data were used in Spearman’s correlation analysis of the results. There was a high response rate from students (thirty-one completed from thirty-two students). The questions asked and the results obtained are shown in Table 1, and discussed in relation to each program, and then as general conclusions.