ELPIS - E-Learning on Palliative care for International Students 

The main goal of the ELPIS project is to enhance the quality of PC in the EU through a better and more uniform education at the undergraduate level. This goal is relevant not only because of the importance of PC, as stated by the European Parliament but also because of the increasing cross-border mobility of medical graduates across the Union, seeking both post-graduate education and occupation. To achieve this goal, the ELPIS project has five intertwined objectives:

1. to promote the design of internally coherent and comparable online undergraduate medical education programs on PC, through the development of a theoretical educational framework

2. to promote effective implementation of online programs on PC, through the development of practice guidelines that are flexible enough to be - suitable for the local organizational context of higher education and PC - fit for the local cultural approach to palliative care and other end-of- life issues, including the students’ point of view

3. to broadcast sharable educational resources, in different European languages

4. to validate the theoretical framework and guidelines through testing and comparing the effectiveness of some local implementations of an online program on PC

5. to design and implement faculty development programs to sustain the design of curricula in PC and the use of the educational resources.

The ELPIS project has four Work Packages:

WP 1: DEFINITION OF THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND DRAFTING OF THE COURSE ON PC

WP2: EDUCATIONAL DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE LOCAL COURSES

WP3: PILOT & TESTING OF THE LOCAL COURSES

WP4: QUALITY ASSURANCE OF DATA, STATISTICS AND ELECTRONIC REPOSITORY OF CONTENTS

The results of the ELPIS project will be:

-a theoretical framework to describe elements and methods for an effective design of online PC courses.

-practice guidelines for the implementation and assessment of PC courses at the undergraduate level.

-a core of multilingual educational resources in an open access repository

-new knowledge and perspectives about the feasibility and comparative effectiveness of different forms of online learning vs in face-to-face learning.