USING WEB 2.0 FOR FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

Deirdre Bonnycastle*, College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, B103 Health Sciences Building-107 Wiggins Road, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5E5 CANADA.

PURPOSE: Bringing faculty development opportunities to the College of Medicine’s 300+ community-based physician/faculty scattered over 588,276.09 square kilometers is a mind boggling task if you try to provide training face to face. Educational Support and Development needed to find innovative ways to meet their mandate with this group.

METHODS: Web 2.0 is the popular term for online tools that allow readers to interact with the online content. This electronic demo will show how tools such as Blogs, Wikis and Elluminate have been used at the University of Saskatchewan to increase the availability of training opportunities to individual physicians at distant locations.

RESULTS: The Medical Education Blog http://blogs.usask.ca/medical_education/ averages 150 downloads a month, there are 2 provincial committees using wikis regularly, the information wiki http://wiki.usask.ca/db/index.php/Main_Page has been accessed 3,293 times. 60 people have participated in three Elluminate sessions. Awareness of the resources is the biggest obstacle to overcome. The second obstacle is engaging faculty to actively participate rather than passively reading.

CONCLUSION/FUTURE DIRECTIONS: Web2.0 tools are a useful method of providing faculty development opportunities to people at a distance because they are relatively inexpensive and easy to create, maintain and access. Engaging people into actively participate with these tools is a more onerous task.