Curriculum Guide for Research Ethics Workshops for Countries in the Middle East

Abstract

To help ensure the ethical conduct of research, many have recommended educational efforts in research ethics to investigators and members of research ethics committees (RECs). One type of education activity involves multi-day workshops in research ethics. To be effective, such workshops should contain the appropriate content and teaching techniques geared towards the learning styles of the targeted audiences. To ensure consistency in content and quality, we describe the development of a curriculum guide, core competencies and associated learning objectives and activities to help educators organize research ethics workshops in their respective institutions. The curriculum guide is divided into modular units to enable planners to develop workshops of different lengths and choose content materials that match the needs, abilities, and prior experiences of the target audiences. The content material in the curriculum guide is relevant for audiences in the Middle East, because individuals from the Middle East who participated in a Certificate Program in research ethics selected and developed the training materials (e.g., articles, powerpoint slides, case studies, protocols). Also, many of the activities incorporate active-learning methods, consisting of group work activities analyzing case studies and reviewing protocols. The development of such a workshop training curriculum guide represents a sustainable educational resource to enhance research ethics capacity in the Middle East.

Knowledge of and Training in Research Ethics in an African Health Research Community

“…Concerns about ensuring that workshops are effective in content and delivery have similarly been expressed in the Middle East (Silverman et al 2010). Very-short-duration training types such as workshops may therefore only be effective if well organized with competent trainers and appropriate curricula, and well attended (Borovecki, Have, and Oreskovic 2006).…”

“…Training programs should take advantage of the bioethics core curriculum proposed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 2008) and the recently published study materials based on the curriculum (UNESCO 2011). Literature providing insights into linking training gaps to training guides is available (Baños et al 2010;Merritt 2010;Silverman et al 2010). Systems that standardize, regulate, and audit research ethics training curriculums and trainers at different levels are required.…”

Building research capacity in Botswana: a randomized trial comparing training methodologies in the Botswana ethics training initiative

“…Research ethics education programs that combine lectures with inter-collegial discussion of case-based ethical situations may be more effective in fostering recognition of ethical issues, capacity for moral reasoning, intentionality, and the ability for action [1,5,6]. …”

An evaluation of a data linkage training workshop for research ethics committees

“…Our research showed that not only is there a strong demand for face to face training opportunities for HREC members, it also provided the expected benefits as described in the literature [14,18,20,29,30]. Face to face training provided participants with a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight into their peers different points of view and approaches and required participants to articulate their ethical reasoning processes [23,29].…”