With the vast amount of online learning resources and information available on the Web when you come to teach or create a learning resource you don’t have to do everything from scratch. There’s lots to pick and choose from, the key is to pick out resources that are relevant to what you’re teaching!
We’ve previously considered issues around copyright and reusing images already published so these can be incorporated into power points, handouts, online resources etc. There’s also the world of #FOAMed – free open access medical education which we’ll also talk about further in Friday’s session.
In this tutorial we’re going to focus on searching for reliable sources of information, multimedia resources such as videos, blog posts about patient experiences which might support teaching in a specific area. The key objectives are:
- To gain an insight into the range of tools that you can use for managing these resources
- To increase awareness of where to look for resources that can support medical education
- Start reflecting about the use of technology as an instrument to reach an educational goal
As you develop your learning resource on this SSC you’ll address these learning objectives. As we look at the teacher as curator you can use this task to help you continue to flesh out your ideas for the learning resource you hope to develop. Even if you change your project idea over the next week you’ll be able to apply what you do here to your chosen content development project and/or apply it to your learning more generally. You’ll be researching your chosen topic and gathering useful pieces of clinical information, guidelines, skills videos, patient experiences or other information relevant to your project.
Whilst the focus of the activities here are designed to support the development of medical education resources you can apply these principles more generally to both your learning and any content development project and the development of your project brief.
ACTIVITY 1 – Choosing and researching your topic
Background – choose a clinical problem or topic
Patient presentations vary widely with some diagnoses being obvious or ‘barn door’ whilst others might be more of a mystery if the patient presents with vague symptoms. In this SSC your project may focus on a clinical topic, problem or condition or another aspect of medicine hopefully the area you’ve chosen to work on is one
- that interests you enough to make further exploration of the condition interesting
- maybe doesn’t enthuse you but you feel is an area you need to improve your own understanding of
- that relates to a patient encounter you’ve found interesting and you’d like to learn more about
- or relates to an identified learning need faced by patients or other students.
What next?
Once you’ve chosen your clinical topic you can use your experience to tell a story. As part of this activity you will be developing a brief scenario that will allow you to explore a number of issues. For example say you choose ‘fever’ as your topic:
Your patient – a male worker with an unexplained pyrexia.
What next? What conditions do you want to explore?
There are lots of options. As an example let’s look at Tuberculosis and think about mapping out the areas you need to research.
Things to think about
1. The Evidence
Think about the evidence and literature searching.
How good are you at it?
– Can you judge the quality of evidence you quote
– Can you find up to date sources of evidence
– Can you reference your case effectively?
What does evidence based mean?
Think about what you have learnt already about evidence and how we judge the value of research.
Other useful links
- Trip database – an online database allowing health professionals to easily find the highest-quality material available on the web – to help support evidence based practice. (Access Trip Pro with University login)
- BMJ Best Evidence (You can sign up for a free account with your University email)
- Medical School Lib Guide – links to other medical evidence databases such as the NHS Scotland Knowledge Network.
2. The basic sciences
Which basic sciences link to your topic – how can you make the exploration of these areas interesting to your reader/learner.
3. Ethical issues
Are there any ethical issues that might be worth addressing in your learning scenario? For example in the case of a health worker with TB what ethical issues might you want your learner to think about and to address?
4. Public health
Where it is appropriate think about the public health aspects of your case.
Working on your clinical topic
Write a short description of the clinical topic or case you’ll be looking at, including the specific condition you’ve chosen if that’s appropriate.
Breaking a clinical problem/case down into basic science, presentation, differential diagnosis, investigation, management and outcomes can be helpful. Some core clinical problems will share the same pathology but result in different clinical presentations, for example patients with MS will have different types of problems depending on where the lesion is in their central nervous system. A group of patients might present with the same problem such as rash but have different causes of the problem.
Make an outline sketch or mind map of the areas you’ll need to research and find resources for. Take a picture and upload this to your blog or draw a mind map online, there are lots of tools out there including mind meister or bubbl.us (or search to see if there are any others) these will let you draw a mind map which can be embedded on the blog.
ACTIVITY 2 – Bookmarking tools
When you’re working on a project and doing research you don’t always have the time to read everything in detail and it can be easy to lose track of useful resources and even forget to reference them in your final piece or work and give attribution where this is essential. Increasingly teachers are developing their own digital toolkits to support the different roles they undertake. In this activity we’re going to introduce you to some of these and ask you to try some of them out to see which you think might be most helpful with this topic as well as supporting your own learning.
There are lots of tools available online for saving links and websites to be looked at later, have a look at the list below and see if there are any that you might find useful. Many of these tools can be embedded onto browsers like Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, meaning that adding a link is a simple as one click. A lot of these tools have apps available for mobile devices that mean interesting articles can be bookmarked on the go and read at leisure. Many of these tools let you add notes and tags, some let you add post-it notes to webpages and highlight sections that are relevant. The list below isn’t exhaustive, if you search for content curation tools you’ll come across others.
Have a look at a couple of these in more detail and share your thoughts on your blog as to whether you think any of them might be useful to a teacher to help manage and share resources or to you as a learner or perhaps to you personally in terms of supporting some of your personal interests. What benefits do you think these tools might bring you? Do you think these sorts of tools can also support your personal learning and help you better organise useful websites, youtube videos etc and help share with your peers?
There are also lots of notebook apps, the most obvious if Microsoft OneNote, you can use the browser toolbar web clipper to add webpages and annotate. There are lots of these apps, some are free with premium options and others you have to buy. Some examples are Evernote, Notion, Zoho Notebook. Do you use any of these or other tools to support your learning?
There are so many tools that we can use to help us with teaching and learning, it can be a bit overwhelming! Jane Hart, a workplace learning professional and expert, has been running an annual survey for 17 years to find out what the top 100 tools for learning are across the learning professionals community. The top tools have changed over the years, Zoom made a notable entry during Covid, but there have also been some constants like Twitter.
Featured image attribution: “Content Curation” flickr photo by *s@lly* https://flickr.com/photos/pomathorn/8637947970 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Updated: January 2024
Author: Natalie Lafferty