TDG – Building e-Health Literacy among University Students

Abstract

This project “Building e-health literacy among University students” aimed to provide a platform to all HKU students (irrespective of the disciplines) to learn about health information searching skills and critically evaluate the reliability of the health-related electronic sources. This project include two 3-hour workshops, a 4-week online learning with two health-related video cases, and one 2-hour face-to-face tutorial which talked about legal and ethical issues related to e-health. Out of the 137 students recruited and randomized, 88 completed all the activities in the project. After all the activities, students had higher level of confidence in searching and understanding online health information (mean difference = 5.45, p<0.002), however there was no significant difference between the intervention group and the control group (p=0.284). This insignificant finding may be due to small sample size. However students expressed that they learnt how to engage in self-search for knowledge, mean (SD) = 3.74 (1.12), and think more critically, mean (SD) = 3.19(0.85). Students also expressed that this was a “very creative course”, it had “a lot of informative websites”, and this project helped them to achieve the learning outcomes, that is, able to know how and where they could find reliable health information.

Deliverables