For DECoP’s September webinar, we were joined by Dr Tessa Davis, Senior Lecturer in the Blizard Institute, Programme Director for QMUL’s Paediatric Emergency Medicine programme and Consultant in Paediatric Emergency Medicine at the Royal London Hospital. In the webinar, Tessa shared her experiences of building online learning communities, showcasing three communities – Don’t Forget the Bubbles, an interview coaching programme for NHS doctors and QMUL’s MSc Paediatric Emergency Medicine.These three learning communities might initially seem quite different, albeit with a common focus on medical education. Don’t Forget the Bubbles is an open and informal professional learning community which grew from a blog in which Tessa and a small group of colleagues shared good practice and new developments in paediatric medicine. The interview coaching programme is a smaller and more structured community, with distinct cohorts, focused on helping doctors prepare for their consultant interviews in the NHS. In the MSc Paediatric Emergency Medicine, Tessa and the team work to create a community based on collaborative learning amongst postgraduate students working towards a formal qualification. Each of these communities has a different purpose, a different structure, and uses different platforms and modes of engagement. However, Tessa identified three principles of community building that are relevant across learning communities:
Tessa emphasised the importance of helping people build their confidence in connecting and sharing with the community. She shared examples of using gamification techniques such as badges and leaderboards to encourage people to engage with forums and other tasks, taking advantage of doctors’ competitive tendencies! For example, participants in the interview coaching programme got a badge for their first post in the community, and another for recording a practice video, But Tessa and the team also thought about how to make it as easy as possible for participants to engage – for example, they were asked to tick off that they recorded their practice video, but they weren’t required to share it with the group. In some instances, Tessa followed up with private messages to participants to thank them for their contributions, highlighting what they’d brought to the community to encourage further engagement.
In each community, Tessa explained that they had seen benefits from creating opportunities to have a bit of fun and connect more informally with other members of the community. This might be facilitated through a side channel for sharing things that might not be directly related to the main topic but allow the identification of shared interests, or celebrating each other’s achievements – even, in the case of Don’t Forget the Bubbles, commiserating with and reassuring a colleague about a bad haircut just before a conference! Encouraging participants to share interesting articles or papers they’ve found, or let others know about upcoming events that might be of interest, can be a good way to help create these additional connections. Offering some optional live sessions in which participants can meet you and each other face to face can help too – or if you have live tutorials, why not give learners a chance to join early or stay afterwards for a less formal conversation with you and their peers?
Of course, the primary purpose of a learning community is just that – learning! Tessa highlighted that learning communities open up opportunities for collaborative learning that simply wouldn’t happen outside the community. In the MSc Paediatric Emergency Medicine, Tessa and the team pose a series of scenarios for students to respond to – students go and investigate an aspect or aspects of the scenario and in doing so, create learning materials for everyone. Tessa shared that getting to this level of co-creation and collaborative learning was an iterative process. Initially, students were assigned an aspect of each scenario to research and respond to – the teaching team kept a close eye on responses, ready to jump in and correct, clarify or add more information. Over time though, it became clear that less direction was needed – students pick different parts to research based on their particular interests, experience or context and together they put together the whole picture. That doesn’t mean the teaching team isn’t on hand, but they’ve found that students tend to be quick to question or clarify ideas with each other.
Tessa also advocated for creating opportunities for, and encouraging, people to take forward ideas they’ve come up with within the community. Is there scope for someone other than you to run a session or take responsibility for an aspect of the community they are particularly interested in? Are there ideas you can take forward together? Tessa shared an example of a paper that went viral, that started as a ‘silly’ idea in Don’t Forget the Bubbles:
Three online learning communities, three principles for community building, an abundance of new ideas! Thank you Tessa for the inspiration.