Capturing the wisdom of the crowd: health professions ’ educators meet at a virtual world café

AbstractBackgroundConversations about educational challenges and potential solutions among a  globally and culturally diverse group of health professions’ educators can facilitate identity formation, mentoring relationships and professional network building. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even more important to co-create and disseminate knowledge, specifically regarding online and fle xible learning formats.ApproachBased on the principles of social learning, we combined speed mentoring and world caf é formats to offer a virtual Zoom™ workshop, with large and small group discussions, to reach health professions’ educators across the globe. The goal was to establish a psychologically safe space for dialogue regarding adaptation to online teaching-learning formats.EvaluationWe aimed to establish psychological safety to stimulate thought-provoking discussions within the various small groups and obtain valuable contributions from participants. From these conversations, we were able to formulate ‘hot tips’ on how to adapt to (sometimes new) online teaching-learning formats while nurturing teacher and student wellbeing.ReflectionThrough this virtual workshop we realized that despite contextual differences, many challenges are common worldwide. We experienced technological difficulties during the session, which needed rapid adaptation by the organising team. We encouraged, but did not pressure, participants to use video and audio during breakout discussions as we wan...
Source: Perspectives on Medical Education - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: research