CE At Your Fingertips: Crowdsourced Continuing Education Calendar and Tracking Tool for Transfusion Technologists

Denise, thank you for your question. Social media is not the end, but a means to the end. The social media concept of "the crowd" will be a method by which the calendar will be populated. The calendar does not replace the actual learning that you would do, but it's role would be to help you gather all of the possibilities that you can learn from. Your calendar would be a listing of all of the possible continuing education events that would be customized for you according to your profile. Of course, these are links or notifications of events and would actually contain the content itself. So, we would not be a repository for all of the various opportunities that you listed above, we would serve as the broker for you to know that those events actually existed. We would bridge you and the educational events together there, but be powered by the transfusion 'crowd'(a social media term) and its knowledge.

Shanta, Thank you for your question. First of all, the judges mentioned that they did like the innovative idea of exploring learning through social media, and that this had never been explored in transfusion medicine. One big thing that came up in multiple feedback comments was the question about sustainability, and how the site would be maintained. These two issues got me thinking about an even bigger issue that technologists face these days. What is that issue? Well, the reality is that healthcare budgets are contracting and continuing education is becoming harder and harder to achieve. Although the question bank is one possible way of allowing people to learn, it is still very limited because it only sources content from mostly Canadian participants, and requires multiple layers of checks and balances. Similarly, there would have to be a continuous refreshment of any concepts, especially if the transfusion thinking was to change over time, and it was not my intention to have a single source of information possibly dominate, as concepts can go stale but also regional variations can potentially dominate the discussion. Therefore, we have entirely dispensed with the question/case bank idea, but have kept the concept of using crowdsourcing and social media in terms of continuing education of technologists. So, after a lot of thinking and discussion with technologist staff, I discovered an even bigger issue was that really good continuing education opportunities were not being disseminated between the technologists in a systematic way. That is, if one technologist knew of, or was going to a continuing education session, it wasn't necessarily true that another technologist would know about it so that they could attend the same session. You would know about it either as a poster, random e-mail, word of mouth, or you may not even find out about it at all. In addition, technologists in smaller centers may not have an opportunity to participate in these sessions, or might not even know about them due to geographical or relative clinical isolation. This problem of knowing what's out there in terms of continuing education opportunities can be solved very well with social media techniques. That is where the idea of the ever evolving continuing education crowd sourced calendar came from. The vision would be that a technologist in any province at any time (day or night, shift or off shift) could have access to a calendar of continuing education opportunities. For instance, I would be able to patch into continuing education offered anywhere in the world provided that I knew about it, and that it was available for me to participate in. This calendar would allow a centralized destination for all of those events to be disseminated to the technologists. It would be sustainable, scalable, and would expand the technologists continuing education universe. We would act as the bridgebuilder between the continuing education event and the individual technologist. Just imagine being able to listen to a transfusion webinar from the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Singapore while you are having lunch just because you knew about it.

1. We would be using a flavor of an SQL database (MySQL, postgresSQL, etc.). Depending on the various calendaring tools/APIs out there, likely have to adapt them for use in this application. 2. We will need to collect enough data to create a profile for the participant. This information would be stored securely on the server. It would be similar to setting up a profile for registration at your local college. You would also select from a universe of tags that allow you to identify your interests. That would essentially make up your profile. 3. The social media integration could take place in various ways. Multiple solutions could include using a Google login or Facebook login. Overall, the social media aspect would be illustrated in how the events populate the calendar through crowd sourcing. Hopefully, this answers your questions.