MedEdPORTAL (Jan 2014)
Instructional Project Elective for Fourth-Year Medical Students
Abstract
Abstract Many fourth-year medical students have a specific healthcare interest or have identified a gap in the curriculum content and want to create a relevant educational presentation. However, faculty who are content experts often have no time or background in educational technology to assist them. The goal of the instructional project elective is to partner a fourth-year medical student with faculty under an educator's guidance to create an instructional project for the medical school curriculum and develop both the interests of the student and faculty in different instructional strategies. By offering an elective driven by fourth-year student interest, faculty participate in four weekly phases to “discover, design, develop, and deploy” with checklists, student grading, and deliverables for the faculty and the student. With each phase, the faculty interacts with the educator, analyzes the project's development, and learns with the student about the instructional strategy. In the last 5 years, all fourth-year students and faculty successfully completed and implemented instructional projects including online simulations, a podcast, a longitudinal curriculum proposal, a clerkship pocket guide, elective courses, boot camps, and 25 online modules. The elective is very successful with minimum time required of faculty to participate. It increased faculty communication with the student and educator, as well as increased faculty satisfaction in that they developed an instructional project. More importantly, preceptors want to participate in more faculty development activities. The expected outcome for the elective is to provide fourth-year medical students with the content and skills to be able to design and develop instructional projects for the current medical school curriculum and for their future roles as physicians, researchers, and educators. All participating fourth-year students expressed how worthwhile the elective was for their future work in planning and producing an instructional project.
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