Designing for Outcomes: Putting the Learner at the Heart of Your Educational Strategy

Write Medicine

Are you measuring educational outcomes but failing to capture the true impact on your learners? As a CME/CPD professional, you know that proving the effectiveness of your educational programs is crucial. But in the rush to gather data and report metrics, it's easy to overlook the individual learner's experience and perspective. Relying solely on quantitative measurements can cause you to miss valuable insights that could help enhance your activities and programs.

In this episode, physician and longtime medical educator Dr. Dean Jenkins shares:

1. Why it's essential to focus on the learner's needs and desired outcomes when designing education

2. The importance of qualitative data in capturing the complexity of healthcare and the learner's voice

3. How defining your target outcomes upfront can improve your learning design and measurement approach

Tune in to discover how putting the learner at the center of your outcomes strategy can help you deliver more impactful and meaningful education!

Takeaways

1. CME must evolve to meet learners' complex and personalized needs, incorporating a more dynamic, qualitative approach to assess learning outcomes.
2. The CME field has been steadily shifting toward valuing outcomes beyond attendance and satisfaction for over a decade. However, analyzing the collected data and using it to improve the learning experience further remains challenging. Standardization of outcomes measurement is vital for the professionalization of CME/CPD.
3. Sharing insights and validated findings within the CME/CPD community is beneficial and necessary to foster improvement in education and patient care. Engaging with the broader community of educators, learners, and health professionals through discussion forums, journals, or social media networks is valuable. Share your findings, experiences, and strategies for measuring and improving educational outcomes, as Dean Jenkins does through his work with Outcomes Engine.

Connect with Dean

[e-mail]

Outcomes Engine

Time Stamps

(02:41) - Introducing Dean

(07:28) - How to package education for learners in ways to address learners' needs and learning styles

(09:22) - Some of the strategies that he uses to determine what those needs are

(13:59) - What Dean is talking about when talking about Pharma-led education

(18:24) - Evolution of measuring and evaluation: assessing learning effectiveness across these different contexts

(20:50) - His involvement in the Outcomes Standardization Project

(21:56) - How Dean sees the field moving forward in terms of outcomes measurement, evaluation, and analysis

(25:12) - His thoughts on whether we are headed toward internal capacity building within the field.

(27:58) - The degree of collaboration between medical affairs teams and colleagues in independent medical education in Europe and the UK

(29:40) - What is Outcomes Engine, and why it’s important

(31:50) - Capturing the learner's voice

(33:26) - How Outcomes Engine will capture the learner’s voice

(35:10) - Dean’s final thoughts

(36:37) - Key takeaways

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