Building An Online Curriculum

Written by Amreet Sidhu

With the establishment of a new PD and associated PD, our program identified three major goals to improve the academic environment at St Joseph Mercy Oakland’s Internal Medicine program. The main strategy we are using to achieve these goals is through a program-sponsored online learning platform. Over the last 1.5 academic years we have seen measurable improvements in learner engagement and confidence, and have developed a reproducible model for other GME departments.

Below is a rundown of what we built and how you could quick-start something similar.

Goals

Below were the three goals we wanted to focus on. These may be different for you. Consider how these goals would influence the personnel and resources you may need.

  1. Facilitate sustained learner engagement with educational materials

    • This sparked from concerns of dwindling and inconsistent in-person attendance.

    • An online platform can be an effective avenue for learners to engage with material without compromising flexibility and clinical duties

  2. Widen program-sponsored educational materials to span multiple learning modalities

    • An online platform is likely the best setting to employ different learning tools, especially those that are evidence-based

  3. Increase program and faculty control over educational materials

    • An online platform allowed our faculty to ensure learners were being exposed to a comprehensive curriculum

Personnel

We recommend a core team of 3 people to spearhead a project like this and suggest dividing up into 3 major roles to target the main goals we had in mind (above):

  1. Someone overseeing medical content

    • For us, this was our program director—they either provided comprehensive medical content or vetted content from other sources prior to it being available to learners

  2. Someone assessing learner needs and curriculum gaps/efficacy, and monitoring overall execution of the curriculum

    • Our associate program director filled this role

  3. Someone designing, building, and maintaining the online platform and its tools

    • This was taken on by the academic chief resident at our program

Online CURRICULUM Structure

Stemming from our goals above, we designed our online platform to involve three main sections:

  1. Core Internal Medicine educational material

    • Using the ABIM Certifying Exam Blueprint [PDF here] to guide curriculum comprehensiveness, we filled our platform with content sequentially as learners progressed through the year-long Internal Medicine curriculum

      • e.g. if we reviewed cardiovascular diseases that month we focused on deploying cardiovascular content

    • We decided to provide material in the form of lecture videos, PDFs, and audio files.

  2. Self-Assessment Tools

    • We use two different testing modalities based on existing literature on evidence-based learning

    • Multiple-choice questions, which were clinical vignette-style, board-type questions

    • Short answer questions in the form of flashcards, which offer learners greater benefits from active recall

    • Similar to core material, we use the ABIM Certifying Exam Blueprint [PDF here] for guidance. Here it allows us to stratify material we are testing and to offer consistent self-assessment tools that naturally align with the curriculum’s structure

      • e.g. if cardiovascular diseases are 14% of tested material on the ABIM certifying exam we would try to offer assessments/content in a similar proportion

      • e.g. if we reviewed cardiovascular diseases that month we built assessments on those topics

  3. Interactive Learning Tools

    • We use interactive tools to offer our learners the chance to practice clinical decision making and problem solving while still leveraging evidence-based learning strategies

      • e.g. we wrote various Rapid Response scenarios for residents to practice their clinical decision making and tested their knowledge through self-retrieval

Web Hosting and Domain

We use Wordpress to build and maintain our website. While not necessary, we opted to pay for hosting and additional web security. Wordpress is a strong recommendation due to the variety of available tools and plugins.

Additionally, we use Namecheap to maintain a domain name. A domain is not necessary but has helped. Many affordable domain services exist out there—we suggest shopping around here.

Total Cost: 300$/yr for hosting, 7$/yr for domain

CORE Internal Medicine educational Material

We suggest two approaches if you are interested in incorporating video material and/or lectures

  • Video camera with tripod; this really helped us in settings where technological resources were unavailable

  • Zoom; a flexible and intuitive tool to record video lectures if you have the resources handy. We incorporated this in response to an incoming pandemic and opted to pay for premium services to allow up to 100 participants per conference.

cost for camera: approx 100-150$ [camera, tripod, SD Cards]

Cost For Zoom: 180$/yr

To consolidate the videos, we use two tools:

  • Vimeo, to host and then embed video content onto our website. We opted to pay for premium services that allowed for accelerated playback (i.e. up to 2x) and private link sharing.

  • On Wordpress we use the Video Lessons Manager plugin—a free tool that allows us to organise video content and track learner viewing/attendance

COST: 240$/yr

Self-Assessment Tools

We’re using two free tools to build the self-assessment tools discussed above:

  • The WP Pro Quiz plugin has been an easy tool to build multiple choice quizzes and provide learners with answers.

  • Qwizcards and their associated plugin have allowed us to build flashcard questions that can be embedded onto our website. There is also the ability to track learner performance.

Interactive Tools

We use Twine, a free, open-source tool for creating interactive stories to build various practice clinical scenarios. Check out some examples of what I’ve built with Twine

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