What’s The Evidence For That? A new series I am starting

One thing I have noticed is that current residents don’t seem to know the evidence supporting a lot of the treatments they use, especially if the studies were done before they started med school.  I also don’t think they really want to read articles from the past when there is so many new things that excite them more. So I came up with a new series of data summaries I am going to make for teaching purposes during rounds to remind the residents and students that there is evidence behind some of what we do.  I designed them to be one pagers and answer what I feel are the key questions on the particular topic I am covering. I also try to follow the Hayne’s 6 S Hierarchy and focus on evidence higher up the pyramid (that isn’t UpToDate or Dynamed). I want to hit the less sexy topics that we encounter a lot on the inpatient medicine service like COPD exacerbation, hepatic encephalopathy, etc.

So here’s the first one I made: What’s The Evidence For That: Steroids for COPD Exacerbation. (Steroids for AECOPD) This took about 1.5-2 hours to make… mostly because I had to figure out how to make the template in Publisher do what I wanted it to do (and it fought me all the way).

Feel free to copy it and use it in your clinical teaching. Let me know if it is useful and how it could be made better. If you make any share them with me.

As I make more of these I will publish them here. I also plan to make Touchcasts of them and will post that here when I do.

 

Interactive Video- The Future of Video for Education and Beyond

I recently discovered a cool tool for teaching- TouchCast. A TouchCast is an interactive video; meaning there is a background video and things popup that can be touched and opened up.

TouchCast Logo

I made a Touchcast on case-control studies. Check it out and see what I mean. Make sure you touch one of the YouTube videos or the web site that I put on the screen to see how it works.

I find this very exciting. I can make a background video that gives a 30,000 foot view of a topic and embed further materials (other videos, websites, etc) for those that want a deeper understanding.

So what are the limitations? For now the interactivity is limited to viewing a TouchCast via their app or their website for the interactive functionality. The videos can be uploaded to YouTube but the interactivity is lost. The length of the video is also limited to 5 or 6 minutes. This isn’t a killer for me because educational videos should be short and in this case I can embed hours of other videos if I wanted to. Finally, the other limitiation (for now, will be changed soon) is that its an iPad tool. A desktop version is coming soon. Hopefully an Android app also.

TouchCast has really broken ground here. This should open up more advancements that will do even more. The future is exciting for us flipped classroom types.

EBM Is In Jeopardy- Gamify A Lecture To Make It More Interesting

This week I did an EBM “lecture” based around the game show jeopardy. Now I know this isn’t anything new. Lots of teachers have used jeopardy format to teach. The point is that it took the content of “EBM Potpourri” (a group of topics that don’t fit well in other lectures that I give) and made it more interesting than a traditional 1 hour lecture (which is how I have given this lecture in the past).

The challenge when doing this to figure out your main teaching points and only include them since you don’t have a lot of extra space for less important topics (but shouldn’t we be doing this anyway?) The next challenge was to make gradually harder questions within each topic. I made some of the questions limited to certain learner levels only (I teach internal medicine residents that are organized into interns, 2nd years and 3rd years) to make sure every one participated independently at least somewhat. The residents only got about 40% of the questions right….but that wasn’t the point. The point was to convey my teaching points and to engage the learners. They worked in their teams (each team consisted of an intern, 2nd yr and 3rd yr) to solve problems. The competition between teams for “great prizes” (certificate of appreciation for 3rd place team, Rice-a-Roni to the 2nd place team, and lunch with me for the winners) made them take it a little more seriously.

If you would like the original PowerPoint file to use in your teaching I’ll be happy to email it to you. Contact me at UABEBM@gmail.com

What unique ways have you taught EBM topics?