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ePoster
Using blogs to teach Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) to medical students

Authors

  • Abdulmohsen Al-Zalabani

Theme

eLearning

INSTITUTION

Taibah University

Background

Blogs is one of the web 2.0 technologies that allow interaction and collaboration in the online environment. Essentially, blogs provide a simple way for people to post content to the web and a simple way for others to read and post comments on that content.

Summary of Work

Blogging was used to augment teaching of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) course to undergraduate medical students. The course is based on classroom teachnig of the principles of EBM and composed of tutorials and practical sessions. The content covers basic principles, formulating PICO questions, searching electronic databses for evidence as well as an introduction to critical appraisal of therapy article.


Students are required to register in a blog service and post their work regularly. Each student select a topic, formulate a question in the PICO format, identify suitable databases, describe their search strategy and the results they got. At the same time, each student should give feedback for at least 2 other students.
At the end of the course, students were invited to fill an online evaluation survey.

Summary of Results

All students signed up for blogging service and 87% of students participated in the evaluation survey.

About 69% beleive that using the blogs make the course more enjoyable while 57% think it increased their enthusiasm.

The blog discussion was beleived to help understanding the EBM concepts mainly through revieweing others' work and being reviewed by others (63% and 34% of students respectively).

Most of particpants (76%) recommend using the approach in similar courses.

Conclusion

Using blogging activity seems to be a successful strategy for student engagement. Moreover, being asked to review their peers' work make students more attentive to the details of concepts and methods used in EBM wich assumably lead to deeper learning.

Further studies to measure the effect on learning outcomes is needed.

Take-home Messages

Augmenting classroom teaching by blogs as a platform for practice and discussion can improve the learning experience.

Background
Summary of Work
Summary of Results
Conclusion
Take-home Messages
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