Social Media use within medical education: A systematic review to develop a pilot questionnaire on how social media can be best used at BSMS

Abstract

Background: Since the early 2000s social media has become a major part of our daily lives, and over the past decade it has found its way into the medical profession. Despite its ubiquity, only 5 systematic reviews exist on the subject of social medial use within medical education. The reviews conclude that there are positive correlations linked to social media use however the studies are restricted by the same limitations: a lack of quantitative data and the fact that social media research fast becomes outdated. This review will therefore examine the latest studies in order to identify which questions remain to be answered and what areas need further development in order for social media to become a credible resource within medical education. The information gained from this process will be amalgamated to create a valid questionnaire which will produce quantitative data.

Social media in nursing and midwifery education: A mixed study systematic review

“…Assessing evidence from other professional disciplines could benefit our understanding of social media in nursing and midwifery education, especially as interprofessional education in healthcare is coming to the fore (Mckay, Steiner, Shekhter, & Birnbach, ; O'Connor, ). Common themes across the reviews from medical and general health education that are in keeping with the findings of this review include evaluating learning outcomes, understanding e‐Professionalism, maximizing flexible learning and online communities for social support, managing workload associated with virtual interactions, and technical difficulties with some social media platforms (Cheston et al., ; Smith & Lambert, ; Sterling et al., ; Whyte & Hennessy, ). These would benefit from further interdisciplinary research to ensure we can learn lessons and implement pedagogical solutions that work for all types of healthcare students.…”

“…However, the poor quality of many studies in the review and lack of experimental research meant it was difficult to draw decisive conclusions about the effect of social media on learning. Systematic reviews of social media in other educational fields such as medicine (Cheston, Flickinger, & Chisolm, 2013;Sterling, Leung, Wright, & Bishop, 2017;Whyte & Hennessy, 2017) and general health education (Smith & Lambert, 2014) have also reported moderate to poor quality studies. They concluded there was limited evidence of the effectiveness of learning via social media.…”

Concluding Commentary. Life Sciences in an Integrated Medical Curriculum: Continuing the Conversation

“…The submissions we received have primarily surrounded innovative learning and teaching approaches including the use of technology with respect to social media (Whyte & Hennessy, 2017), 3D printing (Li et al, 2017), peer teaching (Border et al, 2017;Simpson, Curley, Veloso Costa, & Ahmed, 2017), artistic learning methods (James, O'Connor, & Nagraj, 2017;Keenan, Hutchinson, & Bell, 2017), the flipped classroom (Stoner, Caruana, & Stabile, 2017), the impact of psychometric abilities (Smith et al, 2017) and a description of an integrated Life Sciences course (Fenoll-Brunet et al, 2017). The theme also includes a call for focus on a particularly concerning worldwide Life Sciences topic (Pyatt & Bowater, 2017).…”

“…While the majority of the themed articles concerned anatomy education (Border et al, 2017;James et al, 2017;Keenan et al, 2017;Li et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2017;Stoner et al, 2017;Whyte & Hennessy, 2017), this would perhaps be expected given the apparent proportion of active researchers and published literature in this field when compared to other Life Sciences disciplines. However, we have also received submissions from the relatively less well represented areas of the Life Sciences including physiology (Simpson et al, 2017), microbiology and public health (Pyatt & Bowater, 2017), and the Life Sciences more generally (Fenoll-Brunet et al, 2017;.…”

“…The first submission to our theme was a systematic review of social media, originally based within anatomy but extended to undergraduate medical education more widely (Whyte & Hennessy, 2017). Not only did the authors identify key areas with respect to the use of social media in learning and teaching through implementation of a rigorous review method, they also developed a questionnaire based on these themes in order to provide further insight into this topic during further research.…”