The difficulty of developing innovative, useful educational initiatives that engage learners is not a new problem, particularly within the world of graduate medical education (GME). Faculty and residents around the country have worked for years to find solutions to make weekly conference, didactics, and other educational activities more captivating and effective. In addition, with the vast number of high quality online resources, a new question has arisen as to how to integrate these resources into weekly conferences.

Innovating in Silos

Different programs have had various ideas of how to approach this age-old problem, but there is power in creating a network of people working on the same task at different institutions. New online educational technologies and social media have connected educators in emergency medicine around the globe in a powerful way. We now have the opportunity to avoid re-inventing the wheel and mutually benefit from the hard work of individual educators through information sharing and collective brainstorming on how to improve didactics and educational activities for residents.

What is the IDEA Series?

Through the IDEA series, we hope to showcase examples of what programs worldwide have been doing to make conference more entertaining, engaging, and most of all, educational for residents. This includes descriptions of innovative activities and lessons learned from trialling them. We would love to have every residency program represented!

For now, the series will focus on educational innovations related to resident education. In the future, however, we foresee expanding to include educational innovations for both medical students and faculty.

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