Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Feb 20, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 27, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Psy-Q.com: Assessing Medical Student Utilization of a Novel Online Platform for Question-Based Learning in Psychiatry
ABSTRACT
Background:
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. 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.
Objective:
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. 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:
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 and anonymous and aggerated website use data was also gathered in accordance IRB approval
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:
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 efforts to co-create content and optimize technology to improve engagement offer next steps in exploring how psychiatry educators can bring expertise to new online learning tools.
Citation
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Copyright
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