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.

Use of Tablets in Medical Education - What we can learn from Manchester

I've been watching a series of presentations by students at Manchester Medical School where they discuss their use of the iPad in their studies.  This is the end result of a project where students where issued an iPad in a pilot project at the beginning of this year.  I don't think any of the presentations in and of themselves is ground-breaking.  What I think is very innovative about this program is to have the students take the technology and apply it to problems they identify.  This is not a top-down approach where an instructor is listing apps the students can use, and then evaluating whether the students do what they are told. 

This is really a problem-solving exercise.  It's learner-centered learning at it's very core.  Give a student a tool which has over 30,000 apps available plus web capability, now the students need to go and figure out how to best use it.  First, they all identified problems they had in the past - forgetting important papers at home, having notes highlighted beyond recognition, and inability to physically lug all those textbooks.  They sifted through the app landscape, and came up with some remarkable ways to use the technology.  This is crowd-sourcing at its best.  This is truly the future of technology in medical education.  It's not about the downloading the coolest toy out there and jamming it into a curriculum to make it do something, its about finding the right tool to use to solve the educational problem in front of you.  The students found ways to get around problems with creating and filing notes, filing reading to do later, communicating log data to their supervisor, and creating study aids for themselves and their classmates.  If all the students at Manchester did this project next year, think of the innovations they could produce.  Now think about all the students in the UK, or across nations.  Again, crowd-sourcing at its best.

As Prof Freemont explains in his introduction to the program, this program is not about one particular format.  They chose the iPad for reasons he outlines, but you could likely accomplish similar feats with an army of portable laptops, android tablets, iPads, or whatever the next new thing will be.  I do appreciate the spirit of their experiment.  And, I'd be happy to come personally see what's going on in Manchester.  Maybe sometime next year during football season.