Founding Dean | Toronto Metropolitan University, School of Medicine
Online Teaching & Learning
I engage in both research and innovation about teaching and learning in the digital and online environments. As a core of the METRIQ study team, I have been involved in creating an extensive program of research that seeks to define quality indicators of online educational resources (OERs).
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This was one of my first independent programs of research that I conspired with Dr. Brent Thoma to create. Looping in many collaborators from all over the world, we sought to galvanize a community of like-minded clinician scholars to pursue an agenda to improve online education from both the producers' and users' points-of-view.
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The following are the papers that I have authored within this program, grouped by relevance and annotated so that you can understand what I was thinking!
These papers helped us
get a lay of the land
These papers were innovations that hoped to address the issue of measuring and/or improving quality. But we quickly realized that producers could only do so much...
So... we began our quest to determine quality indicators relevant to blogs and podcasts. We started with a broad search of the literature on what makes a good secondary resource in general, and then consulted experts to determine which indicators were most important.
These papers show that when untrained medical students or attendings rate blog posts for quality, they are not very consistent (or "reliable") in their opinions. So, maybe we need to scaffold their thinking more...
These papers are an attempt to derive & test scoring systems for blogs. One had been derived by a group of educators (AIR) and one was derived by our team based on previous studies.
This is a descriptive paper of how we harnessed an online Community of Practice to further this cause.
Don't worry, we aren't nearly done yet. Many studies pending including ones that examine the METRIQ scores more deeply, as well as usability analyses of the METRIQ / AIR scores.
View a webinar I presented at the University of Southern California in Winter of 2019 that speaks about the role of social media in the life of a scientist.
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