General guide of the course

1. Target audience

This course is specially designed for university students, postgraduates and anyone interested in perimortem circumstances. Besides medical residents such as pathology residents and other health professionals, it is mainly recommended for medical students, nursing students, pathology technicians and all people interested on learning more death-related information. In fact, this MOOC has been created for all those people who want to know how lethal diseases occur and lead to death.

Some basic notions on the subject are necessary, especially those concerning human anatomy and some medical terminology. In addition, it is desirable to have some digital skills and abilities in the use of the online platform where the course takes place.

2. Objectives

This course aims to sensitize students in the use of clinical autopsies as a medical tool to find out the main cause of death in patients and subsequently, to improve the quality of care by reducing the number of errors. To improve awareness about the clinical autopsy and the principal role of postmortem studies is a major goal for the teachers of this MOOC. Apart from that, we will also pay special attention in some other important issues such as high-risk autopsies, methodology, materials, extraction protocols and we will describe some of the main disease that are incompatible with life.

The main objectives of this course are to follow:

1. Teach the fundamentals of clinical autopsies, materials and methods, risks, and lethal diseases.

2. Create a community of people with the common interest of spending some time learning together new concepts about the clinical autopsy.

3. Promote the use of clinical autopsy as an essential diagnostic tool to advance in the knowledge of diseases and therefore to minimize errors.

4. Raise awareness in society about tissue donation for research, especially brain tissue through brain biobanks, which is a fundamental platform for human research progress.

3. Course structure

The course is divided in five weeks plus one additional week to give enough time to widely develop the materials. Before each unit, there is a 10-question test to determine your previous knowledge. Later, theoretical knowledge will be developed accompanied by video-lessons. Some of the topics are accompanied by other video-materials. After that, there will be a series of optional activities to work key concepts learned in each unit. There will also be forums that will allow online interactions between students. We will finally have evaluation activities in which you will have the opportunity to prove all you have learned from each unit.

Table 1. General structure of the course

4. Dinamics of the course

The course is organized by lessons and the access to each of them will be open in a consecutive system along the different weeks that frame the course.

Each lesson, available in English, presents the same structure at the platform:

• Video-Guide: Where we briefly present the purposes, contents and activities that we have proposed to help you to understand and get deeper into the contents of the lesson.

• Lesson: Preceded by a video-lesson, it also contains in PDF format the basic concepts that must understand the key ideas in order to achieve the objectives of each lesson. 

• Weekly Activities: We have proposed two types of activities. The first one allows you to value your comprehension level of the contents through questionnaires about video lessons. The second one needs your active participation in the forum commenting on the different issues analyzed in the course.

5. Self-learning

In each topic, you will find a video lesson with the essential points of each lesson. It is important that you watch it to solve the questionnaires.

        In addition, you will have the lesson in PDF format, with the contents of the topic you are learning about at the moment. At the end of each lesson, you will have access to a section called “Complementary Documentation”, where you will find several links to expand the information treated in each lesson that will allow you to deeper on it.

We have proposed different activities that will help you to understand the concepts, as well as to share your experiences and knowledge with the rest of the MOOC participants.

6. Activities to participate and interact

The activities to promote online learning or participation are intended to share among all participants, opinions, questions and suggestions, to create a learning community.

We will focus on the participation in the Forums where you will have different spaces to discuss the topics of each lesson.

7. Evaluation

To get the course certificate you must exceed 60% of the proposed evaluation activities.

The evaluation of the course will be carried out in two different stages:

1. Preliminary test: consists of 10 questions, 4 options and only 1 is correct. It has a weight of 5% in the final evaluation. It can only be done once.

        2. Evaluation test: consists of 10 questions, 4 options and only 1 is correct. It has a weight of 95% in the final evaluation. It can only be done twice after a period time of one day between each attempt. To pass the unit you will need to reach at least 60% in this test.

8. Certification

At the end of the course you will obtain a diploma. Once you have passed all the units of the course a notification will be generated telling you that you can download your diploma. You can access the certificate by clicking on the “View certificate” button that will appear under the title of the course. By clicking on the button, the certificate will open in a new window from which you can print it or save it. To save your certificate you must, once open, click on the right mouse button, select “print and save as PDF” if you want a digital copy. Or simply “Print”, if you want a paper copy.

The diploma will include, besides your name and the course name, the content and duration of this and the unique verification code that certifies to everyone that you have successfully passed the course.