Teaching and Assessing Clinical Skills

This audit-only/no-certificate course provides insightful guidance on teaching and assessing in the health professions education setting. If you are like me who, at first, thought that the material focuses on clinical skills, let me reiterate that it is not about clinical skills per se but about teaching and assessing those skills. Nevertheless, this offering excellently covers important dimensions on educating younger health professionals outside the comforts of the classroom and where the “action” really is. While the course is inherently applicable for aspiring and current health professions educators, I think that learners/students themselves, like me, can also find great value from this offering. Through this course, I understood the challenges of teaching and assessing students in real-time and with actual patients involved. Furthermore, I also got a glimpse of the “gold standard” aspects of being mentored in the clinical/practical part of medical school, as well as of the expectations my seniors (residents, fellows and consultants) have from me before and as I participate in taking care of our patients. The RIME and BID models should be a welcome addition to the tools of educators, and the module on integrating evidence-based medicine activities in the learning process must be strongly considered by those who have yet to implement them in their setting.

This introductory course is two fold: it outlines the basics of effectively instructing and assessing students in the healthcare sciences, in addition to giving feedback on your current teaching practices. The subjects presented are Feedback, Orientation, RIME model, Entrustment and Assessment, and the BID model for procedural teaching. This course is offered by the U. of Michigan School of Medicine through Coursera and cojointly taught by an Assistant Chair of Education at UMich and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at SUNY Upstate, so they really know their stuff. It is geared toward teaching US residents and medical students, but the concepts presented are universal and easily translate to any location or healthcare profession.

I've previously had a similar courses on the same material (both online and live classroom), but this was suberbly presented in a format that kept me engaged even when the lectures dragged. The concepts and information contained therein are incredibly high-yield with very little extra. The handouts for each unit are educational gold. You can track down the references for the lectures or comb the forums for student recommended reading for more information. The multiple scenarios and debrief lectures could make the indivdual units lengthy, so each unit is best broken up into several days rather than viewed in one sitting. But do not skip the debriefs or the 'perspectives' videos (altho it's tempting), there are hidden gems in each.

The heart of this course is not in the token quizzes or the lectures, it's in the course discussion and the teaching assessments. So if you want to get the most out of this course, read and contribute to the forums and Do The Assessments. (The assessments require the use of students but you do not have to complete the assessments to pass.) There is no required reading. It's geared toward healthcare professionals who do not have a background in education but are actively engaged in teaching. A teacher looking for advanced information probably wouldn't gain much from this class if they are already familar with the presented concepts.

(I'm junior faculty member at an US Internal Medicine residency so this was really applicable to what I do. And it's the first class where I've squirreled away some of the lectures for future review because they are THAT good. )