Welcome to our series, Made with Moodle. Every month, we spotlight someone using the Moodle platform in creative, impactful ways. Have a story of your own? We’d love to hear it.
“We have so many blessings in this country. It feels good to lend a helping hand.”
When Dr. Maggie Marsh-Nation decided to create a training programme to help individuals in underserved regions learn how to administer EEGs, she already knew which learning management system she’d choose — and for good reason.
While working for a leading neurodiagnostic society several years earlier, she discovered that a server switch by their LMS provider had caused every multiple-choice answer in every course to reset to “A”.
At first, when students called to complain about correct answers being marked wrong, she thought they probably hadn’t read the questions properly. But when she looked into it, she found right answers being counted as incorrect.
“That was the worst day of my professional life,” she says. “I had to reprogram all the exams, which took a month.”
That disaster led her to Moodle, and eventually to something far more meaningful than fixing broken quizzes. During her time at Baptist Health Sciences University, Dr. Marsh-Nation founded the Academy of Neurodiagnostic Technology in 2017, offering free EEG training courses to students in countries where such education simply doesn’t exist.
The need is staggering: for example, 80% of people with epilepsy live in low to middle-income countries (LMICs), yet 75% of those individuals receive no treatment at all. In many places, patients with seizures, strokes, or neurological disorders go undiagnosed because there’s no one trained to read or interpret their brain waves.
Her first student, Gebremichael Werede Tesfay, became Ethiopia’s first ABRET-certified EEG technician, while his colleague, Hareg Gebremedhin, became the second. From those humble beginnings, the programme grew to serve students across Africa, India, and beyond.
“It is like teaching someone to swim,” Dr. Marsh-Nation explains. “At first, you steady them and keep them afloat. Then, you stand on the sidelines, coaching. Finally, you cheer them on from a distance while they start teaching others to swim.”
Using Moodle’s modular, adaptable platform, she builds career pathways and sophisticated practice exams that mirror the ABRET certification process. This approach helps students become Registered EEG Technologists (R. EEG T.), giving them the qualifications to transform neurological care in underserved regions.
The ripple effects are profound. Trained EEG technicians in LMICs mean earlier diagnosis of epilepsy and other neurological conditions and proper monitoring for patients with brain injuries or developmental disorders. Most importantly, they bring new hope to communities where neurological care has long been out of reach.
“The world needs more neurodiagnostic technologists, more schools, more teachers. There are millions of patients with neurological disorders who never receive quality neurodiagnostic testing,” reflects Dr. Marsh-Nation. “I am hoping to begin to change that.”
In the end, her aim is not to be the only source of education in underserved regions, but to help those countries develop and strengthen their own educational infrastructure. It’s a wonderful, lofty goal, but one grounded in a simple truth: everyone deserves access to quality healthcare, no matter where they were born.
