MedEdPORTAL: a report on oral health resources for health professions educators.

MedEdPORTAL is a unique web-based peer-reviewed publication venue for clinical health educators sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The open exchange of educational resources promotes professional collaboration across health professions. In 2008, the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) collaborated with AAMC to allow dental educators to use the platform to publish dental curriculum resources. Oral health is integral to general health; hence, collaboration among health care professionals brings enormous value to patient-centered care. The aim of this study was to conduct a current survey of metrics and submission statistics of MedEdPORTAL resources. The data were collected using the MedEdPORTAL search engine and ADEA and AAMC staff. The data collected were categorized and reported in tables and charts. Results showed that at the time of this study there were over 2,000 medical and dental resources available to anyone worldwide. Oral health resources constituted approximately 30 percent of the total resources, which included cross-indexing with information relevant to both medical and dental audiences. There were several types of dental resources available; the most common were the ones focusing on critical thinking. The usage of MedEdPORTAL has been growing, with participation from over 190 countries and 10,000 educational institutions around the world. The findings of this report suggest that MedEdPORTAL is succeeding in its aim to foster global collaborative education, professional education, and educational scholarship. As such, MedEdPORTAL is providing a new forum for collaboration and opens venues for promising future work in professional education.

E-learning as evidence of educational scholarship: a survey of chairs of promotion and tenure committees at U.S. medical schools.

PURPOSE: To ascertain the attitudes of chairs of U.S. medical school promotion committees toward e-learning and how their institutions recognize and reward faculty for e-learning as a scholarly activity. METHOD: In 2007, the authors mailed a questionnaire to chairs of promotion and tenure committees at 123 U.S. medical schools. Chairs rated the importance of major areas of clinician-educators' e-learning performance using a five-point scale (1 = not important; 5 = extremely important). In another section, chairs rated the quality of information that is usually available to evaluate faculty performance in e-learning scholarship using a five-point scale (1 = low quality; 5 = excellent). Respondents were also able to enter qualitative comments about the role of e-learning and educational scholarship at their institution. Frequency distributions for each question were examined to identify any irregularities in the data, and descriptive statistics were used to summarize responses to questions. Themes were extracted from the qualitative data. RESULTS: The response rate to the survey was 51% (63/123). Fifty-six (88.8%) participants indicated that educational scholarship was at least moderately important to a candidate's chances of promotion. Forty-eight (76%) respondents recognized e-learning as a meaningful contribution to scholarship. The chairs rated several levels of evaluation as well as types of e-learning activities and products: changing learner outcomes, developing and disseminating materials, authoring publications, receiving grant awards, serving on editorial boards, and directing a program. CONCLUSIONS: Promotion chairs value selected e-learning activities and products as evidence of teaching scholarship.

MedEdPORTAL: educational scholarship for teaching.

MedEdPORTAL is an online publication service provided at no charge by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The intent is to promote collaboration and educational scholarship by helping educators publish and share educational resources. With MedEdPORTAL, users can quickly locate high-quality, peer-reviewed teaching materials in both the basic and clinical sciences. The existing MedEdPORTAL collection includes instructional and assessment materials to support the continuum of medical education (ie, undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education). The collection features resources designed to improve or enhance teaching and learning. During the past 2 years utilization of published resources and submissions to MedEdPORTAL have grown substantially. MedEdPORTAL currently averages 2 new submissions per day, with 1,000 individual submissions having been received for consideration for publication from educators representing countries around the globe. As of December 31, 2007, 45% of total submissions were accepted and published in MedEdPORTAL, 29% were accepted with revisions, and the remaining 26% were rejected and never published. More than 30 different countries access and utilize resources published and disseminated through MedEdPORTAL. The rapid growth of MedEdPORTAL suggests that it is meeting an important need for those in medical education. It is intended that MedEdPORTAL should continue to grow and eventually become the "one-stop shop" for publishing and locating high-quality, peer-reviewed educational resources that cover the continuum of medical education.