Lessons learnt from a MOOC about social media for digital health literacy

Nowadays, the Internet and social media represent prime channels for health information seeking and peer support. However, benefits of health social media can be reduced by low digital health literacy. We designed a massive open online course (MOOC) course about health social media to increase the students' digital health literacy. In this course, we wanted to explore the difficulties confronted by the MOOC users in relation to accessing quality online health information and to propose methods to overcome the issues. An online survey was carried out to assess the students' digital health literacy. This survey was one of the activities for the enrolled learners in an online course entitled “Social Media in Health Care” on “FutureLearn”, one of the popular MOOC platforms. The course was hosted by Taipei Medical University, Taiwan. Data from a total of 300 respondents were collected through the online survey from 14 December 2015 to 10 January 2016. Most participants (61%) considered finding online health information is easy or very easy, while 39% were unsure or found it difficult to retrieve online health information. Most (63%) were not sure about judging whether available information can be used for making health decisions. This study indicates a demand for more training to increase skills to improve the capability of health consumers to identify trustworthy, useful health information. More research to understand the health information seeking process will be crucial in identifying the skillsets that need to be further developed. MOOCs about digital health can be a great source of knowledge when it comes to studying patients' needs.