Helping medical educators worldwide to pivot curricula online: pivotmeded.com.

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in the implementation of restrictions on group gatherings and educational events in many countries, creating imperatives for medical educators to move curricula online at short notice. Within medical schools and health sciences programmes, this urgency was compounded by competing priorities of health care delivery as many medical educators are also clinicians. To support medical educators, faculty development leaders in Canadian medical schools (FacDevCanada) collaborated to curate medical education resources in three categories: guidance on pivoting to online curriculum (classroom and clinical) delivery; discipline-specific learning resources, and general resources (including basic science, Indigenous health, patient safety and leadership development resources). The FacDevCanada developed PIVOTMeded (Partners in Virtual and Online Teaching in Medical Education), found at pivotmeded.com. Members of FacDevCanada crowdsourced resources in the three categories described above. Resource nominations were reviewed according to the following criteria: open accessibility; lack of evident bias; lack of (or minimal) personal information gathering, and relevance to the likely needs of learners and medical educators. A Google Site platform (Google LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA) was utilised in view of: (a) the platform's relative programming ease; (b) user navigation ease; (c) the platform's facilitation of responsive and dynamic displays compatible with computers, tablets and mobile devices, and (d) the curators' familiarity with the platform. Initially, one person reviewed nominations from contributors and sought materials for inclusion. Two additional medical educators with adeptness in curating resources and configuring the website became co-editors. Two administrative staff supported resource posting and website maintenance. Each resource's post includes a link and a customised annotation. PIVOTMeded launched on 17 March 2020. By 28 April (at the time of writing), the site had 2007 unique users. This indicates a high rate of utilisation; in comparison, a well-established open-access resource for family medicine educators, ‘learnfm.ca,’1 had 1265 unique users in the same 6 weeks. To date, we have curated 84 open-access resources, which support medical educators to pivot curricula online. Content comes from a variety of authors and multiple countries. Users come from 74 countries; the largest cohorts are from Canada (48%) and the USA (24%), followed by Portugal, the United Kingdom and Mexico (3% each). Half of website users visited directly (eg, by typing ‘pivotmeded.com’ into a browser), which suggests awareness of this website by name. One-third of users came through social media links and posts by individuals and organisations including the Association for Medical Education in Europe, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, the College of Family Physicians of Canada, the Harvard Macy Institute, and faculty development units (all utilisation data from Google Analytics [Google LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA]). Key lessons learned refer to: (a) the value of an easily memorable name and URL (uniform resource locator) for this kind of project; (b) the importance of curating site content selectively rather than providing links to a large number of resources (as evidenced by spontaneous feedback and tweets about our project); (c) the need to have multiple people collaborate on this type of project (to ensure high-quality curation within a tight time frame), and (d) the value of tweets, posts and emails from established individuals and organisations in building awareness. Beyond COVID-19, pivotmeded.com will continue to curate open-access materials supporting online medical education.