The Shortcomings of the First Series of Long Distance MPH Education at Kerman University of Medical Sciences, from the Academic's Viewpoint

The first series of long distant MPH (Master of Public Health) education in Iran started at Kerman University of Medical sciences by enrolling 30 students from February 2008. It seemed necessary to document the experience of this program, in order to use the results for tailoring and establishing similar long distance programs in other medical fields and universities. This study was a descriptive phenomenology qualitative study. All academics involved in the long distance education program were interviewed. Open and semi-structured questions were asked. The collected data was then coded and categorized to enable further analysis by using theme analysis. The final text was given to two participants for reading and commenting on the validity. Two main themes emerged from the data. The first was the concern of most of the academics about the quality of education; for example the academics thought the student have not learned as well as the face to face education students, their questions remain unanswered, problem solving is difficult and they procrastinate their reading material. The second theme was the problems of the academics themselves, such as the difficulty of teaching of the comprehensive and practical materials, the fact that preparing materials and communication through telephone and email is more time consuming and lack of a face-to-face contact hinders academics from getting instant feedback from their students. They also thought that academics should have been trained and that the infrastructure of long distance education, such as video-conferencing should have been established in advanced. Conclsion: Long distant education is still taking its first steps in Iran and in order to establish successful courses, appropriate planning is essential. Preparing the proper infra-structure, proper familiarization for students and academics before launching the course and continuous research and education-quality evaluation seems necessary.