The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has triggered an extraordinary and immense change in communities and society across the globe. It signaled the need for advanced approaches for education, leisure, work, and healthcare. A critical factor of this change is the quick and permanent change in the technology used to ensure that work, education, healthcare, and leisure activities get maintained.
The changes have impacted medical education, with a similar quick shift on the technology used for delivering every aspect of the academic schedule, from teaching to assessments to virtual clinical training and across the range of medical education. The institutions, learners, and educators needed to adjust to these changes and manage the maximized demands associated with new practices, external regulatory authorities, and workload. However, simultaneously, the educators were expected to carry on with their scholarship engagement in medical education, offering evidence for tenure and promotion.
Hence, a transformational change is a way to consider a medical education scholarship during the COVID-19 pandemic time. This change might help minimize the tension between the demand to quickly respond to the demands of retaining the delivery of high-end medical curriculum and the requirement to carry on with medical education scholarship. To know more, you can check out the Josh Gibson MD Scholarship.
Medical education scholarship
Many authors have informed the understanding of medical education scholarship, and each has offered a key component. For instance, Boyer has demonstrated four scholarship categories: integration, discovery and creation, teaching, and application. Multiple criteria of how a scholarship can get evaluated were proposed by Glassick, comprising adequate preparation, clear objectives, essential outcomes, appropriate procedures, reflective critique, and clear presentation. The extra features got presented by Hutchings and Shulman, comprising broader dissemination in a way apt for evaluation and review that is available for exchange with various other members of the education community. The institutions have adopted all these scholarship components widely. It leads to an expectation that medical educators would engage in the complete process and offer apt evidence of the same.
The medical education scholarship is generally an iterative cycle, with a teaching experience, recognizing issues that result in a research stage of discovery to generate new understanding and know-how about the issue. These findings might result in innovative teaching approaches through an integration process with multiple knowledge sources, comprising literature review. Through the iterative cycle, there are scopes to evidence scholarship through the scholarly outcomes, like producing and distributing an article that demonstrates the findings and interventions.
The scholarship challenge in the COVID-19 pandemic era
The swiftness of growing disruption and the pandemic’s response to medical education needs institutions and educators to continually manage and make modifications to ensure that the curriculum delivery is apt. It should attain its aims, vision, and the intended outcomes. The monitoring process progress recognizes issues that are essential to initiate the scholarship cycle. With time these issues will gradually become complex. Like educational design research and action research that uses rapid investigation cycles and execution, alternative research methods are necessary to answer the issues.
However, the peer reviewers, editors, and institutions are not familiar with these journals. Additionally, the distribution needed for scholarship evidence through publications in high-end journals might be a time-consuming process. It is the same with journals that have an early pre-publication and also with the ones that don’t have open access.
Responding to the scholarship challenge
The research for scholarship
The iterative nature of the educational design and action research will add and speed up the scholarship of creation and discovery. Several criticisms about educational design and action research, especially concerning their aptness for a scholarship, are all about rigorous data collection and analysis. However, proper attention to details can get easily rectified, for instance, following the legal guidance on performing quantitative and qualitative research.
The educational design and action research intend to execute an academic intervention concurrently and know the multiple factors contributing to an intervention’s scholarly impact. Also, through the iterative cycles, the intervention gets assesses and changed to attain its desired effect. Every process of evaluation, planning, and execution updates the next cycle.
However, the research component, that is, the generation of understanding and new know-how through the assessments, can directly update the teaching development and findings. These findings can get widely distributed to update the work done by medical educators.
Distribution for scholarship
Offering scholarship evidence through the educational outcomes in medical education is a priority for majority educators and institutions. Using technology to assist academic scholarship has got termed digital scholarship. There are multiple online approaches for fast dissemination and publishing, mainly social media and open access publication. The scopes for quick open access publishing today have become highly available, with some providing pre-publication peer assessment and other providing post-publication peer-assessment. Similarly, there have also been growing scopes using multiple social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook. Today, there are appropriately established metrics to update digital scholarship. And the educators can generate portfolios to curate such metrics as evidence.
The institution
There are significant challenges for the institutions in executing the transformational change in medical scholarships. The major challenge is to have a higher acceptance of the design or action research paradigm. They also need to recognize the metrics and evidence of scholarship generated from social media distribution and open access publications.
It is essential to accept these challenges to leverage the evaluation cycle and iterative cycle underpinning the design and action research paradigm. The evolution will require time and training to adopt for academic and senior faculty administrators ultimately. Take some time to prepare for the application process to ensure your success in getting scholarship.
The pandemic has brought a change in medical education, generating an immediate and vital impact on institutions, educators, and students. However, the institutions still need educators to engage in medical education scholarship, offering evidence for tenure and promotion. It is essential to consider a transformational change in medical education scholarship to address the pandemic outbreak’s challenges.