ABSTRACT
e-learning has become an important part of the education system. This is more so in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are a wide range of e-learning platforms available online and offering courses ranging from beginner to advanced levels. Such courses are accessible to nearly everyone around the world who has access to the internet. The readers and learners look for engaging content which will enhance their knowledge and skills in the respective field through e-learning. In order to provide the learners with effective learning, the content should be readable and easy to understand. The motives of the present study are multifold. The presented results will be helpful to the designers as well as creators of e-learning courses in maximizing the learner's attention span, content comprehension, ease of understanding and engagement with the e-course. To the best of our knowledge, this is first formal attempt for the analysis of the transcripts of the e-learning courses. Technically, we deploy five readability indices namely Flesch Readability Index (FRI), Gunning Fog Index (GFI), Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Coleman-Liau Index (CLI), and Automated Readability Index (ARI) for the study. The calculations have been additionally fortified using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). More than 1200 transcripts have been analyzed and vital statistics presented. It is concluded that the transcripts for the beginners should have a word range of 600- 900 while that for the intermediate and advanced learners should have an optimum word count value of around 1050. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Background: Health literacy, a recently determined construct plays an important role in how individuals are able to manage their health. A useful approach for the assessment of health literacy is to measure the comprehension of available patient education materials (PEMs). Objective: We aimed at assessing the usefulness of PEMS available in Hungarian by testing comprehension of selected PEMs in different groups of users. Methods: Comprehension of patient education materials in the domain of healthcare was tested by selecting PEMs and creating questions based on their text in 3 dimensions of health literacy: understand, process/appraise, apply/use. Twenty questions were created that could be answered without pre-existing knowledge by reading the appropriate text taken from PEMs. Comprehension was examined in four groups: laypersons, non-professional healthcare workers, 1st year healthcare students, and 5th year medical students. Readability indices were calculated for the same texts to which questions were created. Results: Laypersons answered <50% of the PEMs-based questions correctly. Non-professional healthcare workers performed better with 57% of right answers but significantly worse than healthcare students or medical students. Those with at least high school qualification (maturity exam) showed significantly higher comprehension compared to those with lower educational attainment. Persons in good or very good health also had significantly better comprehension than those in less favorable health. All readability indices showed that comprehension of the tested PEMs required at least 10 years of schooling or more. Therefore, these PEMS are difficult to understand for persons with less than high school level of education. Conclusion: Rephrasing of the investigated patient educational materials would be recommended so that they better fit the educational attainment of the Hungarian population. Evaluation of the readability and comprehensibility of other PEMs also seems warranted.