Newsletters in Medical Education

Embracing the (r)evolution of social media and digital scholarship in pediatric nephrology education

Free Open-Access Medical Education (FOAMed) has transformed medical education in the past decade by complementing and substituting for traditional medical education when needed. The attractiveness of FOAMed resources is due to their inexpensive nature, wide availability, and user ability to access on demand across a variety of devices, making it easy to create, share, and participate. The subject of nephrology is complex, fascinating, and challenging. Traditional didactic lectures can be passive and ineffective in uncovering these difficult concepts and may need frequent revisions. Active teaching methods like flipped classrooms have shown some benefits, and these benefits can only be multifold with current social media tools. Social media will inspire the involvement of students and allow them to create and share educational content in a "trendy way," encouraging the participation of their peers and thus building an educational environment more conducive to them while promoting revision and retainment. FOAMed also promotes asynchronous learning, spaced learning, microlearning, and multimodal presentation with a meaningful variation. This article discusses the evolution of digital education, social media platforms, tools for creating and developing FOAMed resources, and digital scholarship.

Evolution in Congenital Cardiology Education: The Rise of Digital-Learning Tools

Technology-enhanced learning is now an established part of medical education due to its ready availability and on-demand nature. This offers new opportunities but also challenges to both learners and teachers. This review outlines the current use of social media tools and online resources in medical education with a particular emphasis on congenital cardiology. It provides strategies to the reader on how to optimize learning in the digital environment and offers guidance on how such tools can be incorporated into routine educational practice. Suggestions for developing and assessing educational material online are discussed. Lastly, the concepts of digital professionalism and digital scholarship are explored to aid medical teachers and educators employ these technologies effectively into their teaching and career development.

The evolution of social media in nephrology education: A mini-review

Social media is defined as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content". Social media can be used in medical education to enhance knowledge sharing among peer groups and the public in general. The internet revolutionized learning by allowing easier dissemination of knowledge that did not depend on printing and physical distribution of books, journals, or magazines. According to a report from 2018, 95% of students have access to smartphones and 45% are online at any given time. Social media platforms are powerful tools to spread knowledge by the way of stories, videos, and educational games. Both formal and informal learning can be achieved with the use of social media. The microblogging website Twitter has become a popular social media platform by many in medical education including the nephrology community. Twitter, for example, is used to build communities, discuss journal articles, inform the community of conferences, share infographics and visual abstracts of original research work. As an example, it can be difficult for women in nephrology to connect and travel to make a physical presence. The use of social media allows women to connect via webinars and Women in Nephrology (WIN) India live Twitter chats. Thus, social media can help facilitate networking and collaboration with nephrologists all over the world. Social media has limitations as well. Insensitive posts can have a detrimental effect on one's career. A survey has shown that increased use of social media can contribute to addiction, anxiety, diminished self-esteem, and even depression. Hence, in order to effectively use social media to contribute positively to one's career, we recommend considering the positive and negative aspects of social media.This review will discuss the various social media platforms and how they have been applied to nephrology education.

The Lens: Can a Weekly Newsletter Improve Medical Student Knowledge of the Ophthalmology Literature?

OBJECTIVE

Medical trainees often report barriers to their active engagement with academic medical literature. We assessed whether subscription to The Lens, a weekly newsletter summarizing recent ophthalmology literature, improved readers' knowledge of the literature.

DESIGN

The implementation, uptake, and feasibility of The Lens are described. To assess newsletter efficacy, a 14 question multiple-choice quiz was designed with seven questions based on research articles featured in The Lens and seven based on articles published in high impact ophthalmology journals that were not featured in The Lens. The quiz was statistically validated in a sub-sample of non-subscribers to confirm similar difficulty between Lens and non-Lens quiz items. Among subscribers, within-participant scores on each subsection were compared using paired t-tests. Linear regression was used to determine if participation-adjusted subscription length was associated with quiz scores, after covariate adjustment.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS

Medical student subscribers of The Lens.

RESULTS

Over 12 months, The Lens attained 352 subscribers and summarized 410 research articles in 40 newsletters, at a monetary cost of <$5 per issue. The survey sample comprises 59 medical students who subscribed to The Lens. Subjectively, 83.1% of subscribers reported that The Lens helped them learn about the ophthalmology literature. Among non-subscribers, scores on the Lens and non-Lens quiz subsections were similar (median paired difference = 0%), indicating that subsections were similar in difficulty. Lens subscribers correctly answered 51.1% of Lens items, compared to 42.9% of non-Lens items (mean paired difference, 8.2%; p=0.022), indicating that readers retained information presented in The Lens. In an adjusted linear regression model, each additional participation-adjusted month of subscription to The Lens was associated with a 2.7% improvement in Lens item quiz score (p=0.022).

CONCLUSION

Weekly newsletters can help trainees across medical specialties overcome barriers to engagement with the academic literature and improve their knowledge of recently published studies.

Use of Semiprivate Smartphone Communication Applications in Nephrology Education

Advances in information technology have changed human interactions. These changes have had considerable implications for nonmedical and medical educational practices. The use of semi-private applications such as WhatsApp (Mountain View, CA), Slack (Canada), Viber (Israel), and Google Hangouts (Mountain View, CA) has not been well studied in nephrology education. In this narrative review, we review the literature on the use of these communication applications in medicine and nephrology education. Although many of these applications might be used currently in nephrology, there is little published data regarding the use of WhatsApp in nephrology fellowship. Given the easy accessibility of these communication applications by our learners in medical school, residency, and fellowship, the use of such applications can enhance nephrology education.