Flipped classroom approach for trauma education: Attitudes of participants towards pre-course assignments before the advanced trauma life supports (ATLS) instructor course

Abstract

A flipped classroom approach in principle, denotes pre-course engagement for an upcoming educational course. Although never used in trauma education, other educational literature is resplendent with the beneficial effects of pre-course engagement on the learning outcomes of the course itself. In this article we share the attitudes and perspectives of prospective Advanced Trauma Life Supports Instructors towards pre-course assignments to see whether this works in the field of trauma education.After an online pre-course session, we administered a validated questionnaire to 100 participants. The questionnaire had 4 categories - the first dealing with participants’ characteristics and the rest with their attitude and perspectives towards the pre-course sessions. The last category included three open ended questions for qualitative analysis to explain the attitudes of the participants.The participants showed a significantly positive attitude (p<0.029) towards this flipped classroom approach. The reasons cited were “effective sensitization”, “adequate feedback”, “peer learning” “user friendly platform” “enjoyable” and “relevance”. A significantly higher level of agreement with the questionnaire statements was seen amongst the private sector doctors as compared to those working in public sector medical colleges (p = 0.004). Same was observed amongst clinical specialists as compared to pre or para clinical specialists (p = 0.001). The Questionnaire had a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.86.The study concludes that a flipped classroom approach can work well in trauma education. A tailored approach, depending upon participant characteristics, may be needed to enhance the relevance of a flipped classroom approach.