Capturing the wisdom of the crowd: health professions' educators meet at a virtual world cafe

McKimm, Judy, Ramani, Subha, Kusurkar, Rashmi A., Fornari, Alice, Nadarajah, Vishna Devi, Thampy, Harish, Filipe, Helena P., Kachur, Elizabeth K., and Hays, Richard (2020) Capturing the wisdom of the crowd: health professions' educators meet at a virtual world cafe. Perspectives On Medical Education, 9. pp. 385-390.

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Abstract

Background: Conversations about educational challenges and potential solutions among a globally and culturally diverse group of health professions’ educators can facilitate identity formation, mentoring relationships and professional network building. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even more important to co-create and disseminate knowledge, specifically regarding online and flexible learning formats.

Approach: Based on the principles of social learning, we combined speed mentoring and world café formats to offer a virtual Zoom™ workshop, with large and small group discussions, to reach health professions’ educators across the globe. The goal was to establish a psychologically safe space for dialogue regarding adaptation to online teaching-learning formats.

Evaluation: We aimed to establish psychological safety to stimulate thought-provoking discussions within the various small groups and obtain valuable contributions from participants. From these conversations, we were able to formulate ‘hot tips’ on how to adapt to (sometimes new) online teaching-learning formats while nurturing teacher and student wellbeing.

Reflection: Through this virtual workshop we realized that despite contextual differences, many challenges are common worldwide. We experienced technological difficulties during the session, which needed rapid adaptation by the organising team. We encouraged, but did not pressure, participants to use video and audio during breakout discussions as we wanted them to feel safe and comfortable. The large audience size and different time zones were challenging; therefore, leadership had to be resilient and focussed. Although this virtual format was triggered by the pandemic, the format can be continued in the future to discuss other relevant global education topics.

Item ID: 64963
Item Type: Article (Commentary)
ISSN: 2212-277X
Keywords: Virtual, Online, Speed mentoring, Faculty development, World cafe
Copyright Information: © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Date Deposited: 04 Nov 2020 07:55
FoR Codes: 39 EDUCATION > 3999 Other Education > 399999 Other education not elsewhere classified @ 100%
SEO Codes: 16 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 1699 Other education and training > 169999 Other education and training not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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