TY - JOUR
T1 - Capturing the wisdom of the crowd
T2 - health professions’ educators meet at a virtual world café
AU - McKimm, Judy
AU - Ramani, Subha
AU - Kusurkar, Rashmi A.
AU - Fornari, Alice
AU - Nadarajah, Vishna Devi
AU - Thampy, Harish
AU - Filipe, Helena P.
AU - Kachur, Elizabeth K.
AU - Hays, Richard
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - Background: Conversations 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 flexible learning formats. Approach: Based on the principles of social learning, we combined speed mentoring and world café 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. Evaluation: We 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. Reflection: Through 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 wanted them to feel safe and comfortable. The large audience size and different time zones were challenging; therefore, leadership had to be resilient and focussed. Although this virtual format was triggered by the pandemic, the format can be continued in the future to discuss other relevant global education topics.
AB - Background: Conversations 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 flexible learning formats. Approach: Based on the principles of social learning, we combined speed mentoring and world café 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. Evaluation: We 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. Reflection: Through 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 wanted them to feel safe and comfortable. The large audience size and different time zones were challenging; therefore, leadership had to be resilient and focussed. Although this virtual format was triggered by the pandemic, the format can be continued in the future to discuss other relevant global education topics.
KW - Faculty development
KW - Online
KW - Speed mentoring
KW - Virtual
KW - World café
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092534193&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s40037-020-00623-y
DO - 10.1007/s40037-020-00623-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 33051804
AN - SCOPUS:85092534193
VL - 9
SP - 385
EP - 390
JO - Perspectives on Medical Education
JF - Perspectives on Medical Education
SN - 2212-2761
IS - 6
ER -