Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Feb 20, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 27, 2020
Medical Student Utilization of a Novel Online Platform (Psy-q.com) for Question-Based Learning in Psychiatry: A Pilot Questionnaire Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Introduction: As medical students turn to new and expanding online resources for learning during their psychiatry clerkships, there have been not been concomitant efforts by educators to utilize online tools to promote innovative teaching.
Objective:
Utilizing a free learning platform created by our team, we sought to explore how digital technology may engage medical student learners, promote co-learning between educators and medical students, and support sustainability of online platforms through crowdsourcing.
Methods:
Methods:
Between 2017 - 2019, seven medical schools offered access to the platform during medical students’ psychiatry clerkships. Use of the online platform was voluntary and not monitored or related to clerkship evaluation. Medical students completed a paper and pencil assessment of the website at the end of their clerkship; anonymous and aggregated website use data was also gathered in accordance with IRB approval.
Results:
Results:
203 medical students across seven distinct psychiatry clerkships completed the survey. 62% of students reported using the platform (n=123), and reported accessing a mean of 45 questions. The most common technology to access the platform was via a laptop and the second most common a smartphone. The most common site to access the platform was home and the second the hospital. While few students contributed new questions, web utilization data suggests all did rate quality and difficulty of questions. Higher quality questions were medical students’ main suggestion for further improvement.
Conclusions:
Discussion: Our results suggest feasibility and potential in educator and learner created online platforms to augment psychiatry education and develop relevant accessible resources in the digital sphere. Future work should focus on measuring objective educational outcomes of question taking/writing as well as optimizing technology and exploring sustainable trainee-faculty partnership models for creation and curation of content.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.