Fostering Authenticity in Surgical Education: Creating a Safe Space for Medical Students to Practice as Doctors.

Over the past 10 years we have witnessed major changes to the medical education landscape in response to advances in digital technologies. Couple this with the disruptions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and we have what could be described as a 'perfect storm.' Rather than hunker down and wait for it to pass, we took it as an opportunity to re-evaluate how we practice surgical education in the fourth year of our 6 year medical programme. In this article, we describe the formation of 6 core principles that function as pivot points in developing a new perspective centered on the importance of engaging and empowering our students as emerging clinicians. From these 6 principles, we designed and developed 3 interventions. Each intervention is discussed in regard to its purpose, operation and overall integration into the program.

Synthesis of student engagement with digital technologies: a systematic review of the literature.

Restrictions on physical gathering due to COVID-19 has compelled higher education institutions to rapidly embrace digital technologies to support teaching and learning. While logistically, the use of digital technologies offers an obvious solution, attention must be given to these methods' pedagogical appropriateness, mainly how students engage and learn in the spaces supported by these technologies. In this context, we explored the degree to which digital technologies have contributed to teaching and learning practices over the past decade. The study employed a systematic review using a newly developed tripartite model for conducting and presenting literature review reports. The model approaches the literature review process systematically and employs three phases for the critical examination of literature: description, synthesis, and critique. The current review focused on student engagement across technologies that encompass social media, video, and collaborative learning technologies. Relevant articles were obtained from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Three core themes were identified: there was no shared understanding of what constitutes student engagement with learning technologies, there was a lack of explanation concerning the contextual variation and modalities of student engagement across the digital technologies, and self-reporting was the primary method of measuring student engagement, rendering results as perceptual rather than behavioural. We argue that using multiple datasets and different methodological approaches can provide further insights into student engagement with digital technologies. This approach to measuring engagement can substantiate findings and most likely provide additional insights into students' engagement with digital technologies.