Margaret Wells’s Updates

Update 3 - Multimodal Knowledge Representations - Oral Presentation

Oral Presentation to accompany this update is included below:

I work for an internal medicine membership society, creating assessment and other educational programs for residents and practicing physicians. Our flagship assessment program, ACP's Medical Knowledge Self-Assessment Program (MKSAP) allows our learners to prepare for their certification examinations that are administered following the third year of residency training and the maintenance of certification examination that is administered 10 years following certification. MKSAP also includes concise chapters in the 11 subspecialty areas of internal medicine with associated self-assessment multiple-choice questions. Fifty-plus years ago when MKSAP was first established, the program was offered as a print product with syllabus chapters and questions. Through the years, it has evolved to include floppy disks, CD-ROMs/DVD-ROMS, online content, and, today, apps. As the formats have evolved, ACP has strived to maintain its currency not only in medical content but also in meeting needs of different types of learners. Our current edition, MKSAP 18, offers learners multimodal knowledge representations that encompass print, digital, images, and multimedia in the form of videos and audio. For example, on the topic of mitral stenosis, MKSAP offers the following explanatory content

Related self-assessment multiple-choice questions allow learners to test themselves, and detailed critiques of the correct and incorrect answers help reinforce learning. Finally, learners can access image-based clinical scenarios to help them make a diagnosis. In the video below, an audio file depicting heart sounds indicative of mitral stenosis are presented, along with a video of the pulse associated with mitral stenosis:

Using multiple modalities of conveying knowledge to learners enables us to meet the increasing learner-identified need of more "video content," and also ensures we are on par with competitive learning offerings within the medical education market. For the next edition of our learning program, we are significantly increasing our multmodality offerings, with patient encounter videos, whiteboard videos to demonstrate more complex and dry subject matter (such as nephrology equations), and accompanying audio descriptions from subject matter experts clueing learners with supplemental explanations that shed light on important "takeaway" learning points to supplement our concise text explanations. We are also exploring community learning groups that will supplement our online content while allowing groups of learners to study question content along with subject matter experts in Zoom sessions enhanced by images, video, and audience response.

Multimodal knowledge representations will continue to be significant as we attempt to maintain and increase engagement of our physician learners in the future.