The major challenge for our Department of Continuing Professional Development, in terms of student assessment, is that it is not required. In fact, to some extent, it is prohibited. (I’m not kidding!)
In healthcare education, one must abide by the regulatory agency of each profession, usually called a ‘College’. Both the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and The (yes, ‘The’ must be capitalized) College of Family Physicians of Canada require that educational credits be issued to practicing physicians based solely on their attendance at accredited continuing medical education events, and not on any performance measure.
The truth is, we are not prohibited from including performance measures in our courses, but we cannot refuse to give educational credits to a participant based on their performance on such measures. Consequently, in face-to-face courses, few instructors ever bother with any kind of assessment, except for the occasional use of an audience response systems.
That said, some providers of Continuing Medial Education are sticklers for attendance. Participants are given individual bar-codes and must scan in and out of lecture halls. Anytime they are not in the lecture hall is not credited. As professionals must acquire a certain number of credits annually, this does motivate them to attend.
However, in an online environment, this becomes tricky. Depending on the LMS used, it may not always be possible to see to what extent someone has participated. For example, I may be able to tell that someone has opened a particular learning module, but I have no way of knowing how long they engaged with the material, especially as some of our course materials can be downloaded and read offline. Our solution is to require a final multiple choice quiz of the course content, and so far participants are complying. However, if anyone refused to take the test, or took the test and failed, we would still be required to issue them learning credits.
Bates (2014) is fully aware of this phenomenon, as he indicates in his section on ‘No Assessment’. In fact he describes our learning environment very well: “There may be contexts, such as a community of practice, where learning is informal, and the learners themselves decide what they wish to learn, and whether they are satisfied with what they have learned” (Section A.8.3, p. 2). Physicians themselves are responsible for keeping on top of the latest advances in their area of medicine. They must show that they are attending educational activities regularly; however, which aspects of these activities they find relevant to their own practice are, at this point, up to them to decide.
However, there is now a movement in physician education adapted from business management – that of quality improvement. More and more, physicians are encouraged to assess their own practices, or in some cases, have an outside agency do it. These assessments can then be used to show them which areas would benefit most from improvement. For example, perhaps one practice is far below the national norm in terms of performing immunizations; or perhaps a large proportion of patients have cardiac conditions but the physician has not reviewed advances in cardiac care in some time. Practice assessment, therefore, covers many of the conditions outlined by Gibbs and Simpson (2005), particularly the last few:
- Condition 8: Feedback is appropriate, in relation to students’ understanding of what they are supposed to be doing.
- Condition 9: Feedback is received and attended to.
- Condition 10: Feedback is acted upon.
References:
- Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a Digital Age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/
- Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf