Virtual Professional Development Models

The Problem:
With the advent of COVID-19, course directors in health professions education were forced to transition to remote teaching with little training in online technologies or pedagogies (1).  During the first three months of the pandemic numerous articles were published discussing teaching, learning, and assessment practices. Common themes of the articles were adaptation, innovation, remote delivery, flexibility in the face of a pandemic, and how to continue to educate and graduate competent health professionals (1).  However, while in the press of the pandemic workshops focused on leveraging virtual technologies to enable clinician educators to facilitate learning, little research is available to guide professional developers on how to effectively organize and manage ongoing virtual programs and communities (2).

Instructional Methods:
During this interactive workshop, experienced faculty developers will share findings from their literature review of virtual professional development models (3). Focused on four theoretical models (Community of Inquiry, Community of Practice, Professional Learning Network and Online Learning Community).  In addition to the literature review workshop facilitators will describe their experiences with the models as well as the pros and cons of adapting them to academic health profession contexts. 

References

1. Hays R, Jennings B, Gibbs T, Hunt J, , et al. 2020, 'Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: The perceptions of health professions educators', MedEdPublish, 9, [1], 142, https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000142.1 

2. Crites GE, Berry A, Hall E, Kay D, Khalil MK, Hurtubise L. Applying multiple frameworks to establish effective virtual collaborative teams in academia: a review and recommendations. Med Educ Online. 2020;25(1):1742968.

3. ""Being There"" - Building Productive Scholarly Teams across Distance and Over Time Denise Kay, Cayla R. Teal, Gerald Crites, Andrea Berry, Larry Hurtubise, Elissa Hall, Mohammed K. Khalil Journal of Regional Medical Campuses, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (2018)