Engage Your Learners with Integrated CME Activities

Use Your LMS to Facilitate Learner Engagement in CME Seminars

Most of us can remember (not so fondly) having a professor who droned on and on and on….

There is debate on whether lecturing is ineffective in itself or the lecturers themselves are bad at lecturing. However, there is no debate that educational trends are leaning towards a “both/and” approach to learning. (If you’re unfamiliar, the both/and approach can be used when comparing two or more choices. It allows for a variety in decision making that is impossible when using the more rigid either/or approach.)

CME is following suit, especially in e-learning. Your e-learning courses do not have to be strictly lecture or exclusively reading comprehension. It is the norm for learning management systems to offer various methods to relay educational information. Long and short form assessments, multimedia presentations, and events are just a few of these methods.

However, it’s often the case that courses don’t take full advantage of the variety of educational methods that the LMS offers. Every learner is different, so it follows that a variety of methods will be most effective in engaging your learners as a whole. To keep your learners interested and enthusiastic, we recommend adding new teaching methods into the mix.

One way to fully integrate online and offline CME activities is with continuing medical education seminars. Here’s how.

Leveraging Your LMS to Improve Continuing Medical Education Seminars

While online learning provides unique benefits to both the learners and instructors, it is important to remember that some learning is best accomplished in person. Your courses should include offline seminars and meetings to supplement online learning activities. It’s been observed that the most effective continuing education strategies involved one-on-one methods, group work, feedback, and reminders.

Here are the best tools you can use to integrate continuing medical education seminars into your online CME courses. These tools allow learners to have one-on-one and group work count for CME credits, while also providing opportunities to offer feedback.

First, you should know that you can use your learning management system to track CME credits in small classroom events, annual meetings, and weekend seminars.

To do this, you will simply configure the LMS to enroll and track your learner’s progress. Their training history and credits become part of your learning enterprise. Use your LMS to track enrollment for both online and offline activities. Additionally, the LMS can track attendance through mobile phones. Best yet, you can send announcements and reminders to attendees, so everyone is fully prepared for the event.

With these details crossed off your list, you can focus on the CME seminar itself. To ensure that learners are ready for the live event, you can administer a pre-test. Then, throughout the event, you can continue to track their progress. At the conclusion, learners are encouraged to engage through online evaluations.

As we’ve mentioned, utilizing multiple learning methods in your CME courses will increase your learners’ engagement. And, it doesn’t have to be complicated! Using the current features of your LMS, you can easily track all your educational activities, regardless of meeting method, size, or location.

EthosCE is the industry-leading, SCORM-compliant learning management system designed to automate and modernize the delivery of continuing education in the health professions. We work closely with leading medical association, academic centers, and health system to optimize their technology infrastructure and create an easy-to-use and intuitive environment for learners and CME administrators alike. For more information about our EthosCE, please contact us at 267-234-7401.