Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Oct 3, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 3, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Augmenting Flexnerism via Twitterism: Need for Integrating Social Media Application in Blueprinting Pedagogical Strategies for Undergraduate Medical Education
ABSTRACT
Background:
The involvedness of 21st century healthcare requires re-thinking of current (medical) educational paradigms. In this “Millennial Era” to promulgate the tenets of Flexnerism in undergraduate medical education (UME), requires the design and blueprinting of innovative pedagogical strategies, because the targeted learners are millennials and can be designated as Generation-Y medical students (GYMS).
Objective:
In this proof-of-concept study, we aimed to identify the specific social media application (SMA) platforms that are selectively preferred by GYMS in UME. Further, we wanted to explore if these preferred SMA can be used to design an effective pedagogical strategy to disseminate course learning objectives in the preclinical phase of a spiral curriculum.
Methods:
A cross-sectional survey was conducted by distributing a 17-item questionnaire among the first and second year medical students in the preclinical phase at MBRU.
Results:
The study identified YouTube and WhatsApp as the SMA platforms preferred by GYMS in UME. Further, the study also alluded to the differences in terms of use of SMA in medical education between female and male GYMS, which we believe will assist instructors in designing pedagogical strategies integrating SMA. Additionally, we also appraised the insight of GYMS on the implementation of SMA in medical education. The pedagogical strategy designed employing SMA and implemented in the Biochemistry course, was well accepted by GYMS, and can be translated to any course in the pre-clinical phase of the medical curriculum. Moreover, the identified limitations of this study provide an understanding with regards to the gaps in research, existing towards to the integration of SMA in a medical curriculum catering to GYMS.
Conclusions:
Hence, 21st century medical education requires the effective use of SMA platforms to augment competency based medical education i.e. augmentation of Flexnerism in the current scenario is possible only by the adaptation of Twitterism.
Citation
