This post is provided by guest blogger, Tricia Padgurskis, graduate student at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, MS in Training and Development program.

Are medical schools using quality assurance guidelines to develop their online curriculum? If you were tasked to setup a new online medical education program, would you know how to start?

In the peer-reviewed, BMC Medical Education Journal, Wasfy et. al. (2021) felt there are gaps in the quality standards of online curriculum among medical schools.  They set out to create a list of criteria for best practice in online learning in medical education.  The criteria was based on the data collected from focus groups of novice and expert faculty in online higher medical education.  In this article, the authors list important guided questions to consider when developing online education, including: governance, administration, academic council, faculty and student online training needs, organizational capacity, resources, bylaws, course delivery, course design, learning assessment and human resource needs.  The list provides a nice overview of eLearning management considerations for most curriculum in higher education. However, future application of this tool still need to be studied.

If you need to take a closer look at your college’s online curriculum quality, I highly recommend reading this guide for evaluation of online learning in medical education. 

Reference:

Wasfy, N. F., Abouzeid, E., Nasser, A. A., Ahmed, S. A., Youssry, I., Hegazy, N. N., Shehata, M. H. K., Kamal, D., Atwa, H. (2021, June 10). A guide for evaluation of online learning in medical education: A qualitative reflective analysis. BMC Medical Education. BioMed Central. https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-021-02752-2