Assessment of medical students’ engagement in online learning on a social media platform

Abstract

Background: Social media are popular platforms for sharing information, interacting with others, and are natural extensions of students’ online lives. These features make them attractive to use in higher education to support collaboration and interactions in learning. However, as they are not specifically designed for learning and even less so for assessment, it is necessary to consider adaptations to make them feasible for this purpose. We share our experience in making such adaptations to the social collaborative platform, Workplace (by Facebook) that was used to support and assess online learning for all third year medical students at HKUMed during their one year-long mandatory Enrichment Year (EY). Summary of Work: While on their EY engaging in the research, service/humanitarian work or intercalated degree/ university elective of their choice anywhere in the world, students remained connected to their peers in online communities. These small communities of 6-8 students, guided by their team mentor, worked on designated learning modules designed to link EY experiences with universal themes relevant to doctoring. For mentors to objectively assess students’ engagement with online work, quantitative and qualitative information needed to be easily available and accessible, without having to scroll through numerous and lengthy discussion threads. We developed an egrading system that extracted the frequency and content of students’ posts and all other online activities into a single summary table to inform mentors about students’ online engagement. Summary of results: Thirty-five mentors used the e-grading system to grade 235 students’ work. Mentors used the statistical information and details of students’ discussion to give feedback and assess students’ work on a rubricbased form that was viewable by students. Evaluation by both mentors and students lauded this system as an asset to the assessment process. Conclusions: The e-grading system provided an efficient but comprehensive way for assessing medical students’ online engagement on a social media platform that was well received by users. Take-home messages: Technical adaptations to social media platforms are feasible to enable assessment of online engagement and may be further developed to assist in the assessment of more sophisticated learning beyond engagement.