ACEhp CPD Pulse Points: Pivoting to Online Learning

Chitra Subramanian, PhD, MS, President of ACEhp

In April, the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEhp) began a weekly series of webinars called "CPD Pulse Points." In each session, Chitra Subramanian, current ACEhp president, has a conversation with a guest about a topic relevant to healthcare CPD today. Registration is free for ACEhp members and $25 for non-members. Each session is recorded and made available for learners who are unable to attend the live meeting, so if any of the sessions sound interesting to you, they are available for viewing in full. As long as this series continues, I'll provide a monthly update of key takeaways from the most recent conversations and a list of the previous month's sessions. Because I only recently started writing for the i3 Health blog and because the sessions held in April and May have a similar focus, I'll cover two months in this first ACEhp CPD Pulse Points blog post.

The sessions held in April and May focus on the need to rapidly shift how we are providing education. Live in-person activities have had to be canceled or moved online. The conversations held over these two months look at both challenges of and successes in rapidly shifting from in-person to virtual activities.

• Online conferences don't have to be expensive. Depending on the size of your meeting, you can move an in-person meeting to the virtual world without breaking your budget. You may already have the technology available, and some resources have reasonable annual subscription fees if an upgrade is required to meet your anticipated registration count
• Green screens are helpful when using virtual backgrounds. A simple and very affordable way to create a green screen is to buy a piece of felt and use thumb tacks to hang it behind you. You can easily find free backgrounds to download, or you can create a clean backdrop with your logo, but whatever you choose can be a great help to the potential clutter of working remotely. (I like to pretend I'm sitting near the Colosseum in Rome!)
• We're all still trying to figure out the best way to do online education. In the May 21 session, Rebecca DeVivo shares the results of a survey she conducted of specialty societies. Organizations were asked how they planned to revise their large annual meetings. Some canceled, some postponed, some moved online. Some charged the same fee, some charged less, and some charged nothing. Some held their meetings on exactly the same schedule; some shortened the schedule; some spread the schedule out. There is no right way to make these changes. It's all about figuring out what's best for your learners
• Formative assessments are as important in online education as they are in in-person education. We all tend to be really good at doing summative assessments when providing online education. How hard is it to require passing a posttest in order to receive credit? Formative assessment, on the other hand, requires more work. In a classroom, faculty can easily check in with learners by asking questions or using red and green cards to test where the group as a whole is on the topic. Incorporating formative assessment into online education takes more work and forethought, but it can and should be done. Live activities can use polls or a chat box to solicit feedback from learners. Enduring activities can include the same sort of questions that would be asked in polls or chat boxes with a pause for learners to think of how they would answer the question before the instructor moves forward with the session

The following are the sessions held in April and May. Most of the April sessions are available for free. The $25 fee for non-members was added to this series starting in May.