Abstract
PurposeOnline open educational resources are increasingly used in medical education, particularly blogs and podcasts. However, it is unclear whether these resources can be adequately appraised by end-users. Our goal was to determine whether gestalt-based recommendations are sufficient for emergency medicine trainees and attending physicians to reliably recommend online educational resources to others.MethodsRaters (33 trainees and 21 attendings in emergency medicine from North America) were asked to rate 40 blog posts according to whether, based on their gestalt, they would recommend the resource to (1) a trainee or (2) an attending physician. The ratings’ reliability was assessed using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC). Associations between groups’ mean scores were assessed using Pearson’s r. A repeated measures analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) was completed to determine the effect of the level of training on gestalt recommendation scale (i. e. trainee vs. attending).ResultsTrainees demonstrated poor reliability when recommending resources for other trainees (ICC = 0.21, 95% CI 0.13–0.39) and attendings (ICC = 0.16, 95% CI = 0.09–0.30). Similarly, attendings had poor reliability when recommending resources for trainees (ICC = 0.27, 95% CI 0.18–0.41) and other attendings (ICC = 0.22, 95% CI 0.14–0.35). There were moderate correlations between the mean scores for each blog post when either trainees or attendings considered the same target audience. The RM-ANOVA also corroborated that there is a main effect of the proposed target audience on the ratings by both trainees and attendings.ConclusionsA gestalt-based rating system is not sufficiently reliable when recommending online educational resources to trainees and attendings. Trainees’ gestalt ratings for recommending resources for both groups were especially unreliable. Our findings suggest the need for structured rating systems to rate online educational resources.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi: 10.1007/s40037-017-0343-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Disruptive technology is changing medical education, through the proliferation of blogs and podcasts [1,2,3]
Our findings suggest the need for structured rating systems to rate online educational resources
As medical education shifts towards a flipped classroom model, more and more trainees and attendings are beginning to use these resources. We showed that both attendings and trainees are unable to make sufficiently reliable or consistent gestalt recommendation of online educational resources between key stakeholder groups
Summary
Disruptive technology is changing medical education, through the proliferation of blogs and podcasts [1,2,3]. Critics of online educational resources often point to their lack of formal quality control as a danger resulting from their ease of dissemination [6]. Textbooks and lectures were accepted as being valuable without their quality being formally scrutinized; they benefited from being the only products available. To gain mainstream acceptance and disrupt the established order, the digital parallels of textbooks (blogs) and lectures (podcasts) [8] will have to provide quality assurance that rivals or surpasses these traditional media
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