Flipped Learning in Adult Supervision

Note: This post is published simultaneously in the Malaysian College of Emergency Physicians website

A REPORT ON FLIPPED LEARNING IN ADULT SUPERVISION WORKSHOP 

Date: 01 SEPTEMBER 2015

Venue: Trauma and Emergency Medicine Building, School of Medical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia

The workshop started off with Prof Abd Karim bin Alias explaining the relevance of flipped classroom in adult learners. In his superb presentation, a number of digital applications that are useful to a supervisor/instructor were introduced:

1. TodaysMeet  - a platform to enhance and digitally record conversations that goes on alongside a primary activity (such as a presentation,workshop or discussion)
2. Poll Everywhere - an application designed for responding to polls, presenting polls, and clicking through PowerPoint presentations as a remote control
3. Google drive - that provides the user with a free 15 GB of cloud storage as well as access to a host of great tools including Google docs tool. Participants were encouraged to sign up for a Gmail account to make use of these free apps.
4. Schoology - which is a learning management system that allows instructors to create, manage, and share courses
5. Storify - is a social network service that allows the instructor to create topics by curating relevant contents from the web, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
6. Other apps that he introduced such as app for video recording, soundcloud to create audio podcast, socrative to create quiz questions, making notes in Evernote*, etc can be accessed from his blogpost.

Besides, Prof Karim also recommended a number of sites where public domain images can be obtained: pexels, unsplash and pixabay. He cautioned against using copyrighted images, for example, those images from Disney. He also briefly mentioned a number of good sites for massive open online courses (MOOC) such as openlearning, coursera, etc where participants can sign up for.

The afternoon session saw a number of participants had their hands-on practice in making their storify topics.

At 4 pm, Dr. Saiful joined Prof Karim for a Q&A session on supervision, particularly clinical supervision. Dr. Saiful started off with a short presentation followed by a dialogue with the participants. Two main problems with regards to clinical supervision of MMed students in the fraternity of emergency medicine were voiced out:

• Lack of communication between main supervisors in universities with co-supervisors in their respective Ministry of Health (MOH) hospitals. There should be more frequent and regular communications with the various supervisors. Another participant also hoped that main supervisors pay more visit to the hospitals where the candidates are posted in. This will also help to identify candidates with poor attitudes early enough to rectify the situation.

• Some participants lamented that they do not really know how to supervise. There is a lack of a standardized guideline for supervision. Some participants felt that the main supervisors from universities should define the specific goals to achieve for the co-supervisors in the MOH. In this regard, some participants commented that there are already internationally established supervision and formative assessment frameworks or guidelines that could be adopted for us to draw our own guideline. These include the Fellowship of the College of Emergency Medicine UK (FCEM) work-based assessment. Another participant also commented that at the very minimum some core competencies must be met such as the ACGME six core competencies as well as the highest level of Miller’s pyramid on clinical competency.

With regards to creating online teaching materials, a participant also commented that we should not be working alone on this as it can be very time-consuming and at times “demotivating”, when the time taken to create these contents do not match the number of users who are actually using the contents.  

The workshop ended around 4.45 pm.

Participants with any questions can contact Prof Karim via his email at  akarim@usm.my.

*For example, the Academic Life in emergency medicine (ALiEM) notes can be subscribed in Evernote. Click here: http://tinyurl.com/ntp4blx