Curriculum Principles

Hybrid Learning: A New Concept and Method in Canadian Manual Therapy Education

ecause of the increasing efficiency of online delivery systems, the modern trend in education is to teach in the classroom when you must and use online learning when you can. Jim Meadows designed such a system about seven years ago in the USA and successfully tested it against an established Fellowship training institute where it outperformed the regular students in terms of the number of successful graduates. This is a proven system that the students and employers preferred because it resulted in less time away from work and home and the ability to study at their own pace and style. This is the first time such a system has been used in Canada for a complete manual therapy certification program and potentially for Fellowship. All materials will remain with the students who complete the program so a great resource for reference and in-house education will be available for as long as you want it.

Additionally Swodeam has added videoconferencing to it’s courses to support the classroom sessions. This makes the material familiar and at least partially understood so that the classroom time can be reduced or more time spent on techniques and tutorial learning. It also makes learning concepts, processes etc. is more readily understandable.

By doing more of the work on your own with extensive directed self-learning you save your time and money but become just as expert and possibly more so and in a much shorter time. You will achieve the same level of education as those who earn the Orthopedic Division’s Advanced Diploma in Manual Therapy but you will spend less than 24 days in class as compared with as much as 64 days. If you want to set up a clinical mentorship for yourself then we will provide what assistance we can to make the best experience possible.

The key is to tackle the parts of the course that do not require the presence of an instructor in your home, in your own style and at your own pace where you can learn the way that best suits you. If you are self motivated and do not need spoon feeding or constant re-teaching of previously taught material then this is the method for you.

Swodeam Institute is owned and operated by Jim Meadows FCAMPT who is licensed in Alberta and has taught manual therapy in Canada for better than 30 years. During this time he has been an examiner and teacher for the Division as well as Chair of its Specialization, Examination and Education Committees. Due to substantially increased classroom time, more examinations that often do not count for anything other than being able to take more classes, clinical supervised hours that are mandatory for more advanced learning and perhaps above all massive increases in cost both in time and money it has become more difficult than ever to learn how to treat your patients better.

Jim has never stopped trying to improve manual therapy education and in response to these difficulties he has developed a proven online component to his courses that makes learning considerably less expensive, more convenient and with a more certain outcome.

Hybrid Program and Course Format

Our certification and diploma programs will consist of three levels of education and testing each level made up of three, two and two modules respectively. The online/distributed materials consist of electronic course manuals and other text, narrated and un-narrated PowerPoint presentations and technique videos. Each class is of 2.5 days and builds on previously learned information and the online/distributed materials.

We respect you and your pre-professional schooling enough to build on what you spent years learning there and do not presume that you need us to re-teach this material. Instead our program allows you to assess what you need to review and gives you the tools to do it in an efficient and individualize manner so that you can learn how to apply this knowledge to your studies and your patients.

This program is a series of interconnected packages each with a defined beginning and end so that you can complete your full training in under a year if that is your wish. By deciding to get things completed in a timely fashion you avoid the loss of impetus that occurs when courses are too far apart as well as the leaking of information that happens for the same reason. The fact that our course’s reviews are truly reviews and not re-teaching in part is the reason why we can do so much in such a short time.