How Learning Groups Enhance Continuing Medical Education Success

Healthcare professionals face the challenges of keeping up with a maze of continuing medical education courses, staying on top of evolving medical topics, and focusing on their specific areas of interest or specialty. How can healthcare professionals make sense of the chaos and organizations help their learners achieve success? 

This is where learning groups come into play. These online microsites serve as hubs for resources focused on specific medical topics or themes, making it easy for learners to access core courses, meet other learners they can communicate and collaborate with, and achieve better CME outcomes.  

Organizations can use learning groups to: 

Create Personalized Experiences for Different Topics 

Crafting each learning group with its own sense of identity is crucial to helping users understand each group’s unique goals and objectives. A great way to set the tone early is by customizing elements such as fonts, colors, images, and layout to suit each group’s different needs. These visual cues will also help learners distinguish different learning groups they are part of.  

To enhance this effect, you can observe how each learning group ingests information and adjust your layout accordingly. For example, a group targeted towards healthcare volunteers may benefit from calendar options, discussion boards, and a course overview whereas healthcare professionals looking to develop their knowledge may benefit from different learning group features such as session overviews and slide deck previews.  

Gathering feedback from your learners will be the key to making your learning groups feel personalized and help your learners reach their goals. It will also enable your course creation team to build lessons that will cover both core information and group-specific information.  

Make Information Accessible and Engaging 

Sifting through pages of course descriptions will not only discourage your learners from finding the courses they need to focus on, but also make it hard for them to stay motivated to complete their certifications or credits.  

This is why leveraging interactive learning group features such as the ones listed below can be crucial to giving your learners a clear direction of where to go next and keep them engaged in the learning process.  

1. Courses: Highlight courses your group needs to complete and group them into specific themes or topics they can easily navigate through.  
2. News: Showcase news items relevant to your learning group’s interests both internal and external to your organization.   
3. Slideshows: Spread key details or share upcoming events with strategically placed slideshows throughout your learning group page.  
4. Series: Create a set of regularly scheduled series (RSS) of courses that your learners should know about.  

Nurture a Community for Continued Engagement and Discussion

Organizations can use learning groups to create a community that keeps learners engaged, accountable, and connected. A great way you can instill this into your learning groups is by implementing the features such as: 

1. Events: Virtual, in-person, and hybrid events are a great opportunity for your learners to exchange ideas, dive into shared topics, and get to know each other.  
2. Calendars: Keep your learners aware of the latest and greatest courses and upcoming live events using calendars that can be added to your user’s personal or web-based one. 
3. Roles: Instill a sense of ownership and accountability within your learning groups by assigning designated roles to your group members.   

There are a multitude of ways you can leverage learning group features to make each unique, but the end goal should always be to enhance your learner’s experience and learning outcomes.  

To learn how you can leverage EthosCE’s Learning Group feature to enhance your CME, get in touch with an expert or book a demo now.