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Cerebreon
In January 2001, the DBSCIP awarded a $317,060 grant to the IBIA Academy Division to pursue a project entitled "Internet Virtual Academy". The investigators sought to address the growing demand for advanced clinical training among neurorehabilitation practitioners by developing readily accessible Internet-based clinical training coursework focused on brain injury related treatment issues.
Hypothesis:
The investigators proposed to test a pair of hypotheses:
- Neurorehabilitation coursework can be presented over the Internet as
a viable continuing education option for professionals and laypersons, as compared to land-based learning opportunities and
- Neurorehabilitation coursework can be developed and disseminated in
a cost-effective manner via the Internet.
Key elements of the project were to include: (1) investigation of currently available clinical training options, (2) dissemination of preference surveys to prospective students and content providers, (3) development of cost effective technical operations, (4) content development and course formatting, (5) Internet-based course trials, (6) collaborative partnership development, (7) attainment of CEU/CME accreditation for courses, (8) curriculum launch and outreach activities, (9) ongoing curriculum improvement, and (10) development of an independently funded, self-sustaining capacity.
Results:
For statistical analysis of our visitors, we selected an advanced logfile analysis tool, Urchin 3.3, which provided digestable reports of website traffic. Urchin reports yielded direct feedback from our website visitors. Of particular interest were reports on monthly and annual visitors, pageviews, and hits; pages and directories requested; referrals; and length and depth of visits.
During the year 2002, traffic to the website increased from 150 visitors per month in January to 1,900 visitors in November. Page views per month, a measure of how many individual HTML web pages were viewed, increased from 943 pages viewed in January to 6,133 pages viewed in November. Further analysis of these figures reveals that in January the average website visitor traversed 6.3 pages, while in November, the average length of stay dropped to 3.2 pages. This is a good indication that more visitors are happening upon the site through broader traffic funnels, i.e. more visitors are arriving at the website through search engines seeking information about a given neurological condition rather than through indexes of online course offerings. Nevertheless, the site remains very "sticky", retaining visitors for an average of more than 3 page views. These figures are confirmed by the length and depth of visit reports. These reports show that 80% of the visitors that viewed more than 1 page viewed at least 3 pages, and that 20% of the visitors that viewed more than 1 page in fact viewed 20 or more pages.
The most requested directories contained courses (89.8%), indicating that a large majority of the site's traffic was in fact viewing course materials rather than stopping at the home page or administrative materials, such as search engine indexing files or site information. Of the individual pages requested, 2 of the top 10 individual pages requested were the main pages of courses (specifically, the mTBI and CP Provider courses), indicating that a majority of the requests being made to the site are deciding to begin their course exploration at the first page of the course.
Download Research results
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Visit Cerebreon website: http://www.cerebreon.com
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