Web 2.0 in Medical Education: A Literature Review

Abstract

Introduction: Web 2.0 facilitates communication, secures knowledge sharing and user-centered design. Ease of cooperation and collaboration, user participation in content production, ease of use and rich content are factors that have led to increasing use of web 2.0. The purpose of this study was to review common Web 2.0 tools and their applications in medical education. Methods: This review study was performed using the keywords medical education and Web 2.0 and searching through databases of Scopus, PubMed, Web of Knowledge, Science direct, Sage, Magiran, Noormags, SID, and Civilica for articles published from 2005 to 2016. Results: First, 216 Persian and English articles were found based on the titles. After removing the duplicates (83 articles) and reviewing the abstracts and full texts and considering the inclusion criteria, 1 Persian and 17 English articles were selected. After reviewing the articles on Web 2.0 in medical education, the tools and their uses, as mentioned in these studies, such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, social tagging networks, RSS and Mashups were surveyed. Conclusion: New and emerging uses of technologies highlight the importance of active knowledge production for improving teaching and learning which in turn creates a dynamic interaction among different learning sources. Therefore, it is recommended that universities should take the capabilities of Web 2.0 into account when reviewing educational programs.

Keywords

• web 2.0
• medical education
• literature review
• blogs
• social networks