A Course Design and a Flexible Platform for Learning Programming Languages in Health Informatics Courses: Flexible Platform for Learning Programming Languages

This paper addresses problems of learning programming languages for healthcare professionals. Learners may have limitation of time to understand and apply their knowledge and skills of these topics. This study aimed to create a course design and a flexible learning platform to increase the flexibility learning platform for programming languages in both the normal and the COVID-19 situations. The way in which learners learn was discussed and designed. After a lecture-based session, students could use any of their computing devices including computers with several operating systems, tablets, and smartphones to practice the exercise. Students may workout whenever they wanted and from any locations when the internet connection was provided. In the course design, it began with the programming module and then follow by the computer system module. In this module, a flexible learning platform was constructed to teach the PHP. The real server was installed with Ubuntu Linux, and environments for running the PHP. For the client, only a web browser was enough to learn coding. However, some useful editors with the ability of remote syncing files on the server, were introduced. With this platform, instructors could easily review and modify codes written by learners. Learners also gained some experiences in the computer systems module, i.e., operating systems and network. This concept was applied on a course namely “Computer Systems and Principles of Programming for Pharmaceutical and Health Informatics” in Master Degree in Pharmacy (Health Informatics) in academic year of 2021 during the COVID-19 situation. The results from the questionnaire suggested that the course design and the platform were very useful and flexible. Students had more knowledge and skills by using this learning environment.