Education of first-time mothers in take caring of their neonates through asynchronous education

ABSTRACT

Background: Maternity is one of the biggest chapters in a woman's life. As beautiful as it might be, it comes with many responsibilities and obligations. Most mothers in order to respond to this new role in their life, start searching information on how to take care of their babies.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess the potential of asynchronous education (moodle) of first-time mothers regarding the care of their newborn.

Material - Method: This research was done in a public maternity clinic, using 53 first-time mother participants who were educated about baby care material via tablet. The age of the participants was between 18 to 47 years old coming from different nationalities, background and religions. Part of the e-learning lesson included multiple quizzes which helped the study be more accurate. The collected data compared the awareness of the mothers before and after they were introduced to the e-learning material. In addition, 47 similar knowledge quizzes were collected from first-time mothers online.

Results: The research showed a significant difference between the correct answers regarding the knowledge that the mothers had before studying the asynchronous lessons and after studying them. The median value of the correct answers before reading the lessons was determined at 51% while after reading the lessons it was equal to 90%. As a way of obtaining information about the arrival of their newborns, the participants declared the internet (46.25%) while the second place was occupied by information from books (31.25%). The most correct answers were gathered by the question about the proper bath of the baby (88%) and the fewest were the manipulations in case of drowning of the baby (3%).

Conclusions: The data analysis showed that all participants had almost doubled up the awareness they had before introduced to the asynchronous education. The moodle platform can be used both outside of formal education and for a very diverse audience.

Keywords: Asynchronous education, baby care, first time mothers, breastfeeding, maternity, moodle