Assessment in the new world of CME

I'm at a workshop at the American Academy of Neurology headquarters in Minneapolis working on an online CME activity I am creating for their Neurolearn series.  The AAN is working to create online educational tools for neurologists (although other healthcare providers are welcome to view them as well).  It's my first experience with creation of online, interactive CME.  I'll admit the interactive portions of these courses is still pretty rudimentary, but it got me thinking about how to design these courses as the learning environments become more complex.

What I've come to realize is that in the CME world of the near future, assessment is going to be huge.  If you truly want to develop the learner centered environments, you need to have very solid assessments.  The reason is that if you have a flexible learning path on a particular topic (say fall prevention which is the topic I'm working on), you need to quickly and deftly sort out the novice to expert continuum on the topic within a very brief amount of time.  If you are relegated to MCQ, you probably will have about 5, and at most 10 questions the learner will likely tolerate before you have to shunt them into their learning tract.  And if you mis-align folks and put them in the wrong tract, that will also be potentially disastrous.  I would define disaster here as the learner aborting the course before they have completed it.  A secondary disaster would be someone who is so bored or confused by the content that they complete it, but do not really pay attention to what was presented.  So, your 5 questions need to be very focused, and very strongly crafted to allow you to sort novice to expert quickly.  That will take a lot of effort to achieve that.

So, future CME creators of the world.  I'd strongly encourage you all to consider taking advanced courses on assessment before learning how to do cool stuff through web design.  Just my thought.

If you want to check out the current NeuroLearn courses which are available look here.

Twitter Live Meeting Stream as a Self-reflection Tool

I doubt this post will come as a surprise to many social media gurus out there, but it is something I fully realized only last week.  I've posted to Twitter more regularly from meetings lately.  It is decidedly a skill which I'm still working on mastering.  I think it is a very powerful tool to use while in a meeting to connect with those in the room with you, and also to disseminate information with those not at the meeting.  However, I didn't really get that it could also be useful to me as a self-reflection tool.  I've seen Twitter used more intentionally as a self-reflection tool in an education setting as discussed in this very nice slide presentation posted by Dr. Noeline Wright.  I'd also seen twitter chats put together using Storify or similar sites.  I always thought these things were for the people who weren't in the room, and weren't posting live.

 Then I was sitting at the Pacific Northwest Basal Ganglia Coterie (Parkinson's doctors and scientists) meeting this last weekend next to a fellow conference goer.  He was getting preparing to jot down some notes, and looked at my laptop which was open to Hootesuite.  I had presented about my Twitter account to this group before, so he figured out pretty quickly what live Tweeting from a meeting would entail.  But then, he made the assumption that I was doing the Tweeting primarily for myself as a record that I could go back to look at later.  Again, maybe I'm just a dunderhead, but when I've live Tweeted meeting updates before, I usually didn't think it was for me.  I was thinking about those that may read my stream and learn from it.  I've seen data that reflection is better for retention of lecture material, and yet I didn't put that together.  I went back through my stream at the end of the conference, and hopefully more of the information will stick because of it.

Now that I've figured this out, and I plan to go back through my Twitter feed intermittently as a reflection tool.  The Twitter feeds from meetings may have other valuable information to mine including using it as a a way to prove that you were actively mentally participating in a CME event.  I could be used to evaluate the CME, and also if an presenter has a rich group of streams to look at, it can give them loads of information about the audience for future talk planning.  Who knew all this could come from live Tweeting at a meeting?