Continuing medical education (CME) is required for license renewals, maintenance of specialty board certification, credentialing, and other professional privileges such as places of employment. However, learning gaps can potentially result in issues surrounding patient health outcomes.
In this guide we’ll highlight critical factors ranging from adult learning theory to learning styles and modern technology and demonstrate the importance of improving CME effectiveness and impact for improved learner and patient outcomes.
Uncovering How Adults Learn
CME providers need to provide content to a wide range of learners that incorporates diverse learning styles, which is critical to having deeper learning experiences. Your courses should consider these six principles when creating course content.
- Adult learners want to exercise control over the techniques and goals in their learning.
- Adult learners want to connect their life experiences and knowledge with the content that they have learned.
- Adult learners are relevancy oriented. There must be a motive to learn that is linked to the willingness to learn, since their life situations create a particular learning need.
- Adult learners are generally practical. They learn better when the content is presented in a real-life context.
- Adult learners learners are highly motivated to learn when new information can help them solve significant problems in their lives and/or work.
- Adult learners are results oriented. They want to know why it is important to learn something, what they have to do to learn, and what they will be taught.
Alongside these six principles, you should also keep in mind the different learning styles your learners use such as visual, auditory, kinesthetic (tactile), or reading/writing. Your CME courses should have options for reading text, listening to audio, and viewing graphics and/or videos.
Embrace New and Meaningful Learning Practices
Research has shown that many CME programs fail to achieve sustained learning and meaningful change in clinical decision-making and practice behaviors. Why does this happen?
The top contributing problems to this include:
- Failure to identify and focus on the learners' needs
- Not effectively engaging learners in their learning processes
- Failure to reinforce new learning in ways that lead to the material being applied in clinical practice
As you develop your CME programs on a specific topic, it is crucial that you have a clear understanding of your learners in terms of their levels of knowledge and how it is related to current clinical practice guidelines.
Going Beyond the Lecture Hall
Online learning empowers learners to receive their CME credits in a meaningful way no matter their location or workload. Other benefits include:
- Self-paced and self-centered. Learners can study content at their own pace from anywhere in the world.
- Cost-effective and time efficient. There is no longer the need to attend on-site events, thus avoiding being away from practices and the time and travel expenses.
- Addressing individual learning styles. Learning is not “one size fits all,” so learners can take advantage of the following learning formats.
Other learning types include:
- Livestreaming & Video: Learners can take advantage of interactive Q&As, for example, which can make the event more memorable and address their learning needs in a more direct, accessible, and concrete way. Streaming also reaches learners no matter the distance or location.
- Audio: Podcasts can be made available on a weekly or monthly basis or any other timeframe. The benefit of podcasts is that learners can listen to them at any time, especially during their daily commutes. You can package several to provide a full series of CME content.
- Webinars: Webinars can be easily transformed into on-demand content. You record your live webinars and publish them as on-demand content offerings or enduring materials. You can also group several webinars and publish them in an entire series, either as a single activity or multiple activities, including podcasts
- Enduring Content: Enduring materials can be derived from videos, podcasts, and webinars and can be used in a printed, recorded, and/or online format that can be used at any location. Learners may access these on-demand activities at any time.
Technology Turn-Offs
Today’s learners may be frustrated with CME programs that do not provide them with engaging learning experiences. Improving CME effectiveness and impact is paramount: you must move away from outdated platforms and move to a learning management system (LMS) that will simplify how learners can access the content that they need. However, let’s examine a few areas of an LMS that might not supply learners with an exceptional user experience.
Functionality
Learners shouldn’t have to struggle with an LMS. They should have a way to easily log into the system without having to jump through several hoops afterwards. The average experience for learners using an inefficient LMS tends to follow this sequence of events:
- Determine which activities are available.
- Log in to view the available activities in one system.
- Log in to search the activities based on specialty, webinars, meetings, journal-based articles, live-streaming videos, podcasts, and/or enduring materials using a course or activity catalog.
- Log in to another system to register and pay for the chosen activity.
- Log in to begin the activity. There are just too many things for learners to have to do. These take time that many learners do not have.
Complicated Interfaces
One of the biggest barriers for learners when using a new LMS can be the user experience and design. You should see how easy it is for your learners to navigate through the LMS, register for courses, sign-up for events, see their course progress, and search for relevant activities.
Lack of Meaningful Assessments
Assessments are essential for your learners to confirm they have learned the course content, and for you to see how effective your courses are. This is why it is crucial for your LMS to provide pre- and post-test assessments for your learners to take and provide feedback.
Turning Knowledge into Action
Improving CME effectiveness and impact should not be left to chance. Your LMS should supply the technology for conferences, meetings, events, and other activities. It should provide CME content creation and delivery tools to learners and make it simple for them to take their courses.
Whether through audio, video, or text, learners should be able to access CME content at any time. An LMS platform such asEthosCE offers various technologies for you as a CME provider and your learners, with a single sign-on so there is no frustration with accessing the system throughout the CME user journey, from initial course searches to content completion.
