Many of us have a love/hate relationship with technology, and it often involves standing in front of a bunch of intelligent students while technology fails us. As educators, how can we prevent this from happening? A recommendation is to choose your instructional strategy first, investigate the theory behind the strategy second, and then pick the technology that affords you benefits you would not get with the old methods. In this blog post, I offer strategies for doing this, and provide a short list of common strategies related to theory, then matched with technology benefits.

The American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine annual conference was packed full of thought-provoking sessions, including an interesting discussion on appreciative inquiry (specifically appreciative advising).

Many health care systems are faced with increased demands for safe and effective health care delivery as well as easier access to affordable health care services. These developments have resulted in the need for reform to the socioeconomic, political and medical educational agendas of several countries around the world. Central to these agendas is the need for leader and leadership development in medical training programs and integrating leadership education into the curricula of these diverse programs. Over time, educational frameworks have emerged in different countries to address this need for physician leadership education and many of them describe leadership using concepts like professionalism, communication, collaboration, advocacy and scholarship. Still, the process of reform and the implementation of leadership education proves to be difficult to achieve in the formal training programs of physicians. In this blog post, we introduce readers to sanokondu which is an international collaboration aimed at developing leaders within medicine globally.

Health professions educators are increasingly engaged in educational scholarship. Many times, a survey is suggested as a way to collect data for scholarly activities related to teaching, learner assessment, program evaluation, and research, to name just a few. However, survey design is both an art and a science, and poorly designed surveys are unlikely to provide credible data. In this blog post, I offer six principles to guide the design and development of high-quality surveys in health professions education, with the ultimate goal of helping readers design better surveys for collecting better data.

As the Harvard Macy Institute and the field of health professions education have developed over the last 25 years, there has been a parallel growth in funding and scholarship within the equally multidisciplinary field of global health. Education and global health increasingly interconnect, and herein I discuss some of their fruitful crossings and lay out a vision of where the overlap between the two fields may lead.