INTRODUCTION: Learning research methodology is increasingly becoming an essential part of graduate medical education worldwide, with many regulatory and accreditation bodies requiring residents to participate in scholarship. Research methodology workshops have become a standard part of medical curricula; however, there is limited data on how much training on journal selection and the publication process trainees receive. The alarming growth of predatory journals has made it increasingly difficult for researchers, especially trainees and early career physicians, to distinguish these publications from reputable journals. The purpose of this study is to assess the knowledge of reputable and predatory publishing practices amongst medical trainees in an international medical education setting in the United Arab Emirates. METHODS: A survey on credible journal practices based on the 'Think. Check. Submit' initiative was sent to all graduate medical education trainees at two large academic medical centers in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Descriptive statistics were used to tabulate variable frequencies. RESULTS: Over half of the 160 respondents reported receiving prior research methodology training and 42.5% had at least one publication. The majority of the trainees selected impact factor and the quality of the peer-review process as characteristics of reputable journals. Ambiguous editorial board and rapid publication process were recognized as characteristics of predatory journals by >65% of trainees, however, 95% of all trainees were unaware of Beall's list or other resources to help select a journal for publication. 15.2% of trainees who received unsolicited emails from publishers submitted their manuscripts to the unfamiliar journals, citing peer recommendation and pressure to publish from their training programs as reasons. CONCLUSION: Trainees in the United Arab Emirates were mostly unaware of reputable publication practices and are vulnerable to publishing in predatory journals. Policy and educational reform are necessary to maintain the credibility and integrity of the scientific process.
An at first sight seemingly coherent, global medical workforce, with clearly recognizable specialities, subspecialties and primary care doctors, appears at a closer look quite variable. Even within the most progressive countries as to the development of medical education, with educators who regularly meet at conferences and share major journals about medical education, the differences in structures and regulations are big. This contribution focuses on the preparation, admission policy, duration, examinations, and national competency frameworks in postgraduate speciality training in Germany, the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands. While general objectives for postgraduate training programs have not been very clear, only recently competency-frameworks, created in a limited number of countries, serve harmonize objectives. This process appears to be a challenge and the recent creation of milestones for the reporting on progress of individual trainees (in the US and in Canada in different ways) and the adoption of entrustable professional activities, a most recent concept that is quickly spreading internationally as a framework for teaching and assessing in the clinical workplace is an interesting and hopeful development, but time will tell whether true harmonization across countries will happen.
BACKGROUND: Since the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in 1955, the applications of AI have increased over the years within a rapidly changing digital landscape where public expectations are on the rise, fed by social media, industry leaders, and medical practitioners. However, there has been little interest in AI in medical education until the last two decades, with only a recent increase in the number of publications and citations in the field. To our knowledge, thus far, a limited number of articles have discussed or reviewed the current use of AI in medical education. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to review the current applications of AI in medical education as well as the challenges of implementing AI in medical education. METHODS: Medline (Ovid), EBSCOhost Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) and Education Source, and Web of Science were searched with explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria. Full text of the selected articles was analyzed using the Extension of Technology Acceptance Model and the Diffusions of Innovations theory. Data were subsequently pooled together and analyzed quantitatively. RESULTS: A total of 37 articles were identified. Three primary uses of AI in medical education were identified: learning support (n=32), assessment of students' learning (n=4), and curriculum review (n=1). The main reasons for use of AI are its ability to provide feedback and a guided learning pathway and to decrease costs. Subgroup analysis revealed that medical undergraduates are the primary target audience for AI use. In addition, 34 articles described the challenges of AI implementation in medical education; two main reasons were identified: difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of AI in medical education and technical challenges while developing AI applications. CONCLUSIONS: The primary use of AI in medical education was for learning support mainly due to its ability to provide individualized feedback. Little emphasis was placed on curriculum review and assessment of students' learning due to the lack of digitalization and sensitive nature of examinations, respectively. Big data manipulation also warrants the need to ensure data integrity. Methodological improvements are required to increase AI adoption by addressing the technical difficulties of creating an AI application and using novel methods to assess the effectiveness of AI. To better integrate AI into the medical profession, measures should be taken to introduce AI into the medical school curriculum for medical professionals to better understand AI algorithms and maximize its use.
Summary Objective: The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) agreed on revising the existing international recommendations in health informatics /medical informatics education. These should help to establish courses, course tracks or even complete programs in this field, to further develop existing educational activities in the various nations and to support international initiatives concerning education in biomedical and health informatics (BMHI), particularly international activities in educating BMHI specialists and the sharing of courseware. Method: An IMIA task force, nominated in 2006, worked on updating the recommendations’ first version. These updates have been broadly discussed and refined by members of IMIA’s National Member Societies, IMIA’s Academic Institutional Members and by members of IMIA’s Working Group on Health and Medical Informatics Education. Results and Conclusions: The IMIA recommendations center on educational needs for health care professionals to acquire knowledge and skills in information processing and information and communication technology. The educational needs are described as a three-dimensional framework. The dimensions are: 1) professionals in health care (e.g. physicians, nurses, BMHI professionals), 2) type of specialization in BMHI (IT users, BMHI specialists), and 3) stage of career progression (bachelor, master, doctorate). Learning outcomes are defined in terms of knowledge and practical skills for health care professionals in their role a) as IT user and b) as BMHI specialist. Recommendations are given for courses /course tracks in BMHI as part of educational programs in medicine, nursing, health care management, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, health record administration, and informatics /computer science as well as for dedicated programs in BMHI (with bachelor, master or doctor degree). To support education in BMHI, IMIA offers to award a certificate for high-quality BMHI education. It supports information exchange on programs and courses in BMHI through its Working Group on Health and Medical Informatics Education.
BACKGROUND: Educational meetings are widely used for continuing medical education. Previous reviews found that interactive workshops resulted in moderately large improvements in professional practice, whereas didactic sessions did not. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effects of educational meetings on professional practice and healthcare outcomes. SEARCH STRATEGY: We updated previous searches by searching the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group Trials Register and pending file, from 1999 to March 2006. SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised controlled trials of educational meetings that reported an objective measure of professional practice or healthcare outcomes. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two authors independently extracted data and assessed study quality. Studies with a low or moderate risk of bias and that reported baseline data were included in the primary analysis. They were weighted according to the number of health professionals participating. For each comparison, we calculated the risk difference (RD) for dichotomous outcomes, adjusted for baseline compliance; and for continuous outcomes the percentage change relative to the control group average after the intervention, adjusted for baseline performance. Professional and patient outcomes were analysed separately. We considered 10 factors to explain heterogeneity of effect estimates using weighted meta-regression supplemented by visual analysis of bubble and box plots. MAIN RESULTS: In updating the review, 49 new studies were identified for inclusion. A total of 81 trials involving more than 11,000 health professionals are now included in the review. Based on 30 trials (36 comparisons), the median adjusted RD in compliance with desired practice was 6% (interquartile range 1.8 to 15.9) when any intervention in which educational meetings were a component was compared to no intervention. Educational meetings alone had similar effects (median adjusted RD 6%, interquartile range 2.9 to 15.3; based on 21 comparisons in 19 trials). For continuous outcomes the median adjusted percentage change relative to control was 10% (interquartile range 8 to 32%; 5 trials). For patient outcomes the median adjusted RD in achievement of treatment goals was 3.0 (interquartile range 0.1 to 4.0; 5 trials). Based on univariate meta-regression analyses of the 36 comparisons with dichotomous outcomes for professional practice, higher attendance at the educational meetings was associated with larger adjusted RDs (P < 0.01); mixed interactive and didactic education meetings (median adjusted RD 13.6) were more effective than either didactic meetings (RD 6.9) or interactive meetings (RD 3.0). Educational meetings did not appear to be effective for complex behaviours (adjusted RD -0.3) compared to less complex behaviours; they appeared to be less effective for less serious outcomes (RD 2.9) than for more serious outcomes. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Educational meetings alone or combined with other interventions, can improve professional practice and healthcare outcomes for the patients. The effect is most likely to be small and similar to other types of continuing medical education, such as audit and feedback, and educational outreach visits. Strategies to increase attendance at educational meetings, using mixed interactive and didactic formats, and focusing on outcomes that are likely to be perceived as serious may increase the effectiveness of educational meetings. Educational meetings alone are not likely to be effective for changing complex behaviours.
Access to diverse, well-annotated medical images with interactive learning tools is fundamental for training practitioners in medicine and related fields to improve their diagnostic skills and understanding of anatomical structures. While medical atlases are valuable, they are often impractical due to their size and lack of interactivity, whereas online image search may provide mislabeled or incomplete material. To address this, we propose MIRAGE, a multimodal medical text and image retrieval and generation system that allows users to find and generate clinically relevant images from trustworthy sources by mapping both text and images to a shared latent space, enabling semantically meaningful queries. The system is based on a fine-tuned medical version of CLIP (MedICaT-ROCO), trained with the ROCO dataset, obtained from PubMed Central. MIRAGE allows users to give prompts to retrieve images, generate synthetic ones through a medical diffusion model (Prompt2MedImage) and receive enriched descriptions from a large language model (Dolly-v2-3b). It also supports a dual search option, enabling the visual comparison of different medical conditions. A key advantage of the system is that it
Contribution: This article analyzes the learning effectiveness of a virtual educational escape room for teaching software engineering and compares this activity with traditional teaching through a randomized controlled trial. Background: Educational escape rooms have been used across a wide variety of disciplines at all levels of education and they are becoming increasingly popular among teachers. Nevertheless, there is a clear general need for more robust empirical evidence on the learning effectiveness of these novel activities and, particularly, on their application in software engineering education. Research Questions: Is game-based learning using educational escape rooms more effective than traditional lectures for teaching software engineering? What are the perceptions of software engineering students toward game-based learning using educational escape rooms? Methodology: The study presented in this article is a randomized controlled trial with a pre-and post-test design that was completed by a total of 326 software engineering students. The 164 students belonging to the experimental group learned software modeling by playing an educational escape room whereas the 162 student
Sir William Osler organized a journal club at McGill University in 1875, and several authors suggest that journal clubs were found in certain European countries (in particular, Germany and England) prior to that time. The evolution and development of the journal club, however, has not been recorded in the medical literature. Through personal communications and interviews with senior clinicians and historians, I have traced the history of the journal club as an educational modality. In the early 1900s in Germany, journal clubs were routinely found in departments of medicine and medical schools. From 1917-1975, journal clubs evolved into a forum for continuing medical education. Recently, journal clubs have been designed to teach critical appraisal skills to physicians-in-training. Journal clubs are currently found in the fields of medicine, surgery, psychiatry, nursing, pharmacy, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics and geriatric social service. This powerful educational tool has played an active role in medical education for over a century. The journal club should be more formally incorporated into the medical educational curriculum.
Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation `export scores' within the discipline of Statistics.
The gap between theory and practice is well-documented in educational research. Physics teachers' willingness to apply research findings in practice may be influenced by a sceptical attitude towards science education research. This study explores physics teachers' perspectives on science education research, with a particular focus on potential scepticism towards the discipline. A two-step mixed-methods approach was employed: (1) Interviews with a purposeful sample of 13 experienced physics teachers for a first exploration of attitudes towards physics education research, and (2) a quantitative survey of 174 physics teachers to examine, among other aspects, the previously observed attitudes in a larger sample and to identify teacher profiles using latent profile analysis. The interview study revealed both sceptical and non-sceptical attitudes towards physics education research, including some that fundamentally questioned its practical value. Based on the survey data and latent profile analysis, four distinct teacher profiles differing in their level of scepticism towards science education research were identified. While one profile is highly sceptical, the other three exhibit a mix
Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research aims to publish research papers, reviews and short communications in the areas of medicine and medical research. JAMMR will not only publish traditional full research reports, including short communications, but also this journal will publish reports/articles on all stages of the research process like study protocols, pilot studies and pre-protocols. JAMMR is novelty attracting, open minded, peer-reviewed medical periodical, designed to serve as a perfectly new platform for both mainstream and new ground shaking works as long as they are technically correct and scientifically motivated. The journal also encourages the submission of useful reports of negative results. This is a quality controlled, OPEN peer reviewed, open access INTERNATIONAL journal. Subject matters include studies in clinical areas like immunology, anaesthesia, cardiovascular medicine, complementary medicine, dentistry and oral medicine, pathology, pharmacology and therapeutics, dermatology, respiratory medicine, rheumatology, drugs and medicines, ear, nose and throat/otolaryngology, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, neurology, nutrition and metabolism, obstetrics and gynaecology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, genetics, geriatric medicine, haematology, oncology, ophthalmology, paediatrics, psychiatry, radiology, renal medicine, pharmacognosy, sexual health, urology, epidemiology, ethnic studies, health policy, occupational health, medical education, legal and forensic medicine, environmental medicine and public health, medicine development and safety testing, drug legislation and safety. From 2015, every volume of this journal will consist of 12 issues. Every issue will consist of minimum 5 papers. Each issue will be running issue and all officially accepted manuscripts will be immediately published online. State-of-the-art running issue concept gives authors the benefit of 'Zero Waiting Time' for the officially accepted manuscripts to be published. This journal is an international journal and scope is not confined by boundary of any country or region.
OBJECTIVES: To investigate perceptions of medical students on the role of online teaching in facilitating medical education during the COVID-19 pandemic. DESIGN: Cross-sectional, online national survey. SETTING: May 2020 across 40 UK medical schools. PARTICIPANTS: Medical students across all years from UK-registered medical schools. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The uses, experiences, perceived benefits and barriers of online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. RESULTS: 2721 medical students across 39 medical schools responded. Medical schools adapted to the pandemic in different ways. The changes included the development of new distance-learning platforms on which content was released, remote delivery of lectures using platforms and the use of question banks and other online active recall resources. A significant difference was found between time spent on online platforms before and during COVID-19, with 7.35% students before versus 23.56% students during the pandemic spending >15 hours per week (p<0.05). The greatest perceived benefits of online teaching platforms included their flexibility. Whereas the commonly perceived barriers to using online teaching platforms included family distraction (26.76%) and poor internet connection (21.53%). CONCLUSIONS: Online teaching has enabled the continuation of medical education during these unprecedented times. Moving forward from this pandemic, in order to maximise the benefits of both face-to-face and online teaching and to improve the efficacy of medical education in the future, we suggest medical schools resort to teaching formats such as team-based/problem-based learning. This uses online teaching platforms allowing students to digest information in their own time but also allows students to then constructively discuss this material with peers. It has also been shown to be effective in terms of achieving learning outcomes. Beyond COVID-19, we anticipate further incorporation of online teaching methods within traditional medical education. This may accompany the observed shift in medical practice towards virtual consultations.
Participatory Educational Research journal is one of the journals that contributes to the field of education and indexed in major international databases such as ERIC and Scopus.This study provides the bibliometric characteristic of the total 347 articles published in PER during the period of 2014-2021 using bibliometric analysis. Publish or Perish software to collect citation data from Google Scholar was used as an analysis instrument for the impact of the articles.
International collaboration is sometimes encouraged in the belief that it generates higher quality research or is more capable of addressing societal problems. Nevertheless, while there is evidence that the journal articles of international teams tend to be more cited than average, perhaps from increased international audiences, there is no science-wide direct academic evidence of a connection between international collaboration and research quality. This article empirically investigates the connection between international collaboration and research quality for the first time, with 148,977 UK-based journal articles with post publication expert review scores from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Using an ordinal regression model controlling for collaboration, international partners increased the odds of higher quality scores in 27 out of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) and all Main Panels. The results therefore give the first large scale evidence of the fields in which international co-authorship for articles is usually apparently beneficial. At the country level, the results suggests that UK collaboration with other high research-expenditure economies generates higher q
This paper aims to draw a picture of current medical education in The Netherlands. Based on strong historical roots in the seventeenth century, Dutch medical education has adapted to changing circumstances through the ages. Nowadays, medical education in The Netherlands may be called "modern", according to international standards and schools such as the one in Maastricht serve as examples, nationally and internationally. After considerable redesign of undergraduate education in the 1980s and 1990s, the first decade of the new century shows a revolutionary development of postgraduate medical education, with the introduction of nationwide competency-based training, and mandatory in-training assessments and portfolios for residents. The high level of activity in medical education development is reflected in high research productivity, measured as Dutch articles in international journals. Despite these strengths, several critical issues around medical education are in debate, ranging from entrance selection, small group tutoring, the two-cycle bachelor-master model and the relevance of basic sciences to the planning of enrolment numbers and working hours for residents. Medical education in The Netherlands is a dynamic field.
Contribution: This article analyzes the learning and motivational impact of teacher-authored educational video games on computer science education and compares its effectiveness in both face-to-face and online (remote) formats. This work presents comparative data and findings obtained from 217 students who played the game in a face-to-face format (control group) and 104 students who played the game in an online format (experimental group). Background: Serious video games have been proven effective at computer science education, however, it is still unknown whether the effectiveness of these games is the same regardless of their format, face-to-face or online. Moreover, the usage of games created through authoring tools has barely been explored. Research Questions: Are teacher-authored educational video games effective in terms of learning and motivation for computer science students? Does the effectiveness of teacher-authored educational video games depend on whether they are used in a face-to-face or online format? Methodology: A quasi-experiment has been conducted by using three instruments (pre-test, post-test, and questionnaire) with the purpose of comparing the effectiveness o
BACKGROUND: The application of digital games for training medical professionals is on the rise. So-called 'serious' games form training tools that provide a challenging simulated environment, ideal for future surgical training. Ultimately, serious games are directed at reducing medical error and subsequent healthcare costs. The aim was to review current serious games for training medical professionals and to evaluate the validity testing of such games. METHODS: PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, PsychInfo and CINAHL were searched using predefined inclusion criteria for available studies up to April 2012. The primary endpoint was validation according to current criteria. RESULTS: A total of 25 articles were identified, describing a total of 30 serious games. The games were divided into two categories: those developed for specific educational purposes (17) and commercial games also useful for developing skills relevant to medical personnel (13). Pooling of data was not performed owing to the heterogeneity of study designs and serious games. Six serious games were identified that had a process of validation. Of these six, three games were developed for team training in critical care and triage, and three were commercially available games applied to train laparoscopic psychomotor skills. None of the serious games had completed a full validation process for the purpose of use. CONCLUSION: Blended and interactive learning by means of serious games may be applied to train both technical and non-technical skills relevant to the surgical field. Games developed or used for this purpose need validation before integration into surgical teaching curricula.
ChatGPT is the world’s most advanced chatbot thus far. Unlike other chatbots, it can create impressive prose within seconds, and it has created much hype and doomsday predictions when it comes to student assessment in higher education and a host of other matters. ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model (a variant of OpenAI’s Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) language model) designed to generate text that can be indistinguishable from text written by humans. It can engage in conversation with users in a seemingly natural and intuitive way. In this article, we briefly tell the story of OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT. We highlight the fundamental change from a not-for-profit organisation to a commercial business model. In terms of our methods, we conducted an extensive literature review and experimented with this artificial intelligence (AI) software. Our literature review shows our review to be amongst the first peer-reviewed academic journal articles to explore ChatGPT and its relevance for higher education (especially assessment, learning and teaching). After a description of ChatGPT’s functionality and a summary of its strengths and limitations, we focus on the technology’s implications for higher education and discuss what is the future of learning, teaching and assessment in higher education in the context of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. We position ChatGPT in the context of current Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) research, discuss student-facing, teacher-facing and system-facing applications, and analyse opportunities and threats. We conclude the article with recommendations for students, teachers and higher education institutions. Many of them focus on assessment.
BACKGROUND: In the face of severe faculty shortages in resource-constrained countries, medical schools look to e-learning for improved access to medical education. This paper summarizes the literature on e-learning in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), and presents the spectrum of tools and strategies used. METHODS: Researchers reviewed literature using terms related to e-learning and pre-service education of health professionals in LMIC. Search terms were connected using the Boolean Operators "AND" and "OR" to capture all relevant article suggestions. Using standard decision criteria, reviewers narrowed the article suggestions to a final 124 relevant articles. RESULTS: Of the relevant articles found, most referred to e-learning in Brazil (14 articles), India (14), Egypt (10) and South Africa (10). While e-learning has been used by a variety of health workers in LMICs, the majority (58%) reported on physician training, while 24% focused on nursing, pharmacy and dentistry training. Although reasons for investing in e-learning varied, expanded access to education was at the core of e-learning implementation which included providing supplementary tools to support faculty in their teaching, expanding the pool of faculty by connecting to partner and/or community teaching sites, and sharing of digital resources for use by students. E-learning in medical education takes many forms. Blended learning approaches were the most common methodology presented (49 articles) of which computer-assisted learning (CAL) comprised the majority (45 articles). Other approaches included simulations and the use of multimedia software (20 articles), web-based learning (14 articles), and eTutor/eMentor programs (3 articles). Of the 69 articles that evaluated the effectiveness of e-learning tools, 35 studies compared outcomes between e-learning and other approaches, while 34 studies qualitatively analyzed student and faculty attitudes toward e-learning modalities. CONCLUSIONS: E-learning in medical education is a means to an end, rather than the end in itself. Utilizing e-learning can result in greater educational opportunities for students while simultaneously enhancing faculty effectiveness and efficiency. However, this potential of e-learning assumes a certain level of institutional readiness in human and infrastructural resources that is not always present in LMICs. Institutional readiness for e-learning adoption ensures the alignment of new tools to the educational and economic context.
Educational technology has attained significant importance as a mechanism for supporting experiential learning of science concepts. However, the growth of this mechanism is limited by the significant time and technical expertise needed to develop such products, particularly in specialized fields of science. We sought to test whether interactive, educational, online software modules can be developed effectively by students as a curriculum component of an advanced science course. We discuss a set of fifteen such modules developed by Harvard University graduate students to demonstrate various concepts related to astronomy and physics. Their successful development of these modules demonstrates that online software tools for education and outreach on specialized topics can be produced while simultaneously fulfilling project-based learning objectives. We describe a set of technologies suitable for module development and present in detail four examples of modules developed by the students. We offer recommendations for incorporating educational software development within a graduate curriculum and conclude by discussing the relevance of this novel approach to new online learning environmen