JGME-ALiEM Hot Topics in Medical Education: Analysis of a Multimodal Online Discussion About Team-Based Learning

BACKGROUND: Team-based learning (TBL) is an instructional method that is being increasingly incorporated in health professions education, although use in graduate medical education (GME) has been more limited. OBJECTIVE: To curate and describe themes that emerged from a virtual journal club discussion about TBL in GME, held across multiple digital platforms, while also evaluating the use of social media in online academic discussions. METHODS: The Journal of Graduate Medical Education (JGME) and the Academic Life in Emergency Medicine blog facilitated a weeklong, open-access, virtual journal club on the 2015 JGME article "Use of Team-Based Learning Pedagogy for Internal Medicine Ambulatory Resident Teaching." Using 4 stimulus questions (hosted on a blog as a starting framework), we facilitated discussions via the blog, Twitter, and Google Hangouts on Air platforms. We evaluated 2-week web analytics and performed a thematic analysis of the discussion. RESULTS: The virtual journal club reached a large international audience as exemplified by the blog page garnering 685 page views from 241 cities in 42 countries. Our thematic analysis identified 4 domains relevant to TBL in GME: (1) the benefits and barriers to TBL; (2) the design of teams; (3) the role of assessment and peer evaluation; and (4) crowdsourced TBL resources. CONCLUSIONS: The virtual journal club provided a novel forum across multiple social media platforms, engaging authors, content experts, and the health professions education community in a discussion about the importance, impediments to implementation, available resources, and logistics of adopting TBL in GME.