Online Education in a Hurry

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

Podcast #10 features health professions educational leaders Sarah Teele and Traci Wolbrink, discussing their recent article Online education in a hurry: Delivering pediatric graduate medical education during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges to learning and teaching in post graduate education. In this paper, Sarah Teele and colleagues describe their response within the pediatric cardiology program at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) - Online education in a hurry: Delivering pediatric graduate medical education during COVID-19. They report their work on “redesigning the clinical learning system - including a description of the learners and environment, the pedagogical principles that guided the approach, and technological tools used in implementation.”

Sarah Teele is a pediatric cardiologist the intensive care unit at BCH, as well as a clinical educator and researcher. She is currently completing the Master's program in Health Profession Education at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Professions. Traci Wolbrink is a pediatric critical care physician and leading educator who joined the conversation from her perspective as senior author on the paper and co-director of OPENpediatrics – the platform used by the team.

The insightful conversation with Traci and Sarah canvassed issues like setting strategies for online learning, platform selection, cultivating online engagement, curating resources, and evaluating programs. We concluded by offering some thoughts on future directors for scholarship in this area.

Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about health care simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.