Leveraging E-Learning for Pedagogical Innovation in PA Education

Physician assistant (PA) education must prepare graduates to “hit the ground running” as members of interprofessional teams, delivering patient-centered quality care in a complex technologically advanced health system. To meet this challenge, PA faculty should consider pedagogies that promote critical thinking, reflective practice, collaborative problemsolving, and evidence-based decision-making. Yet, adoption of innovative pedagogies can prove challenging when facing accreditation standards, expanding class size, and a demanding curriculum, and while trying to keep PA education affordable and accessible. Integration of e-learning models in combination with active learning pedagogies offers promise for navigating these challenges in an effort to meet educational goals and promote graduate competency and future success. E-learning is a broad category that covers a wide variety of course models incorporating internet technologies. Benefits of e-learning include increased accessibility, increased selfefficacy and self-direction in learning, opportunity for selfassessment, immediacy of feedback, flexibility in where and when learning occurs, interactivity, potential for reflection and knowledge generation, cost-effectiveness, and additional mechanisms for assessing outcomes. More recently, institutions such as theNational Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly the Institute of Medicine, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation have noted the potential of elearning to facilitate connections between the health care delivery and health care education systems, which promote continuous learning across the health care system. In 2011, the NAM convened a committee to address health care challenges and to consider how to achieve a continuously learning health care system. Regarding the education system, the committee recommended: “Health professional education programs should teach new methods for accessing, managing, and applying evidence; engaging in lifelong learning; understanding human behavior and social science; and delivering safe care in an interdisciplinary environment. ” Subsequently, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation hosted a conference entitled “Enhancing Health Professions Education through Technology: Building aContinuously LearningHealth System” in which they defined a continuously learning health care system as one in which “teachers, learners, and clinical data inform continuous improvement processes, enabling lifelong learning, and improve the health of the public. ” Conference participants represented expertise in medical, nursing, and other health professions, health policy, higher education, health care delivery systems, and technology related to health information systems, online learning, and education software. Participants determined that achieving this vision requires faculty development in “effective use of educational technologies to complement the teachinglearning process. ” In other words, faculty must be taught tomarry appropriate technology to learning theory to achieve desired learning outcomes. Increasingly, medical and health professions education is adopting e-learning models to promote active pedagogies while negotiating challenges of access, time, and cost. Recent publications address a “paradigm shift” within medical education and health professions education, facilitated by the adoptionof e-learning strategies, fromapassive approach in which the teacher is the “purveyor of knowledge” to an active, learner-centered approach in which the teacher facilitates the learner’s active engagement in the process of knowledge generation and application. Enhancing or blending an existing course or program using internet-based technologies can support adoption of active learning methods, yielding higher levels of learningwhile allowing increased access to education. For most PA programs, classroom lectures have been the primary teaching pedagogy for years; Feature Editor’s Note: