Since 2007, IAMSE has honored medical educators from its membership with two prestigious awards to recognize and promote teaching excellence and educational scholarship in the medical sciences. We are still accepting nominations for the 2021 Excellence in Teaching awards, which will be presented at the annual meeting in June 2021. Qualified candidates may self-nominate or be nominated by an IAMSE colleague.
Details regarding each award, required application materials, and deadlines can be found here. Member login is required.
Please submit the pre-application packet for the Early Career and Distinguished Career awards to support@iamse.org by December 31, 2020.
News
Thank you for your continued support of IAMSE!
We want to say a big THANK YOU for your continued support throughout this challenging year. Because of you, we are able to bring a broad and diverse representation of non-profit and commercial entities forward for consideration during multiple times at our annual meeting each June.
We hope that you will consider exhibiting with us at our virtual meeting, to be held from June 12-17, 2021. The IAMSE meeting is a perfect place to display educational products and services and engage with meeting participants from around the world. We look forward to meeting our much-valued previous exhibitors again, as well as welcoming our first-time exhibitors.
We will have specific information regarding exhibiting opportunities to share with you in the coming weeks. Registration for the event will open in early 2021. If you have any questions about exhibiting with or supporting IAMSE, please feel free to reach out to us at support@iamse.org.
#IAMSE21 Call for Poster & Oral Abstracts Deadline Extended
In light of the shift to a virtual-only conference in 2021, IAMSE would like to remind you that the call for poster and oral abstracts has been extended! Abstracts are now due December 8, 2020! The IAMSE meeting offers opportunities for faculty development and networking, bringing together medical sciences and medical education across the continuum of healthcare education.
Deadline: December 8, 2020
There is no limit on the number of abstracts you may submit, but it is unlikely that more than two presentations per presenter can be accepted due to scheduling complexities. Abstract acceptance notifications will be returned in March 2021.
#IAMSECafe Hosts to Hold Open Discussion on Resilience
Stay connected with your colleagues around the globe and join us for this week’s IAMSE Cafe round table discussion. Please join our hosts, Francisco RaĂșl Barroso Villafuerte from the School of Medicine in the Health Science Division of Anahuac University of Mexico as well as Kelly Quesnelle and Wendy Lackey-Cornelison of WMU Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, for an open conversation about resilience.
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Tuesday, December 1, 2020 at 10AM EST â Resilience: An open discussion with IAMSE Cafe Hosts. Resilience and adaptability have been recognized as important attributes of successful medical students and clinicians. These traits may be even more important today as both students and faculty have to cope with the additional stresses associated with learning, teaching, and practicing during a pandemic. How do we help build resilience in ourselves and our students? How do you model resilience for others when you are struggling?Â
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To join the meeting please click here. The meeting password is IAMSECafe or, if you are calling in from a phone, the numeric password is 778130.
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We look forward to seeing you this week!
An Important Update on the IAMSE 2021 Conference
#IAMSE21 Now Exclusively Virtual
The IAMSE Board of Directors, based on input from the IAMSE membership and our meeting partners, has decided to shift all events associated with the 2021 Annual Meeting, Global Perspectives on Health Sciences Education, to an online format. Although we may be able to gather in small groups by next June, the cascade consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, including ongoing safety concerns, restricted travel, budget allotments, and availability, have forced IAMSE to make this difficult but necessary decision.
I want to recognize and thank so many of our members for the work that they have put into the 2021 Annual Meeting over the past year. The IAMSE Board is especially grateful to Mark Hernandez, who is leading the meeting planning, and to the Annual Program Committee for their work. They have responded graciously to our announcement to transition the in-person meeting to an online format and are in full support of the decision. They are currently back at work to bring you an amazing online version of our Annual Meeting.
We recognize that many of you have been debating whether to present your work at the 2021 IAMSE Annual Meeting due to uncertainties and concerns regarding travel. Therefore, we are extending the abstract deadline for oral and poster presentations from December 1st to December 8th, 2020. Click here for more information!
Even though we will not be meeting in person this year, we have shifted our focus to create a virtual event that promises to be just as robust and educational as any IAMSE event you have attended or heard about in the past, with several exciting new opportunities to complement the virtual venue.
- Virtual Plenary Presentations – Each of our four plenary speakers will deliver their planned presentation with live Q&A. Each evening, our plenary speakers will join us once again for a rebroadcast of their presentation and a second live Q&A session for our colleagues around the globe who were not available to attend the original session.
- Workshops and Focus Sessions â We are excited to announce that we will be offering the same synchronous educational opportunities through pre-conference workshops and focus sessions as you would expect at an in-person meeting.
- Poster and Oral Presentations â We anticipate a record number of poster and oral presentations for our 2021 Meeting and we plan to provide participants both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities to interact with authors and their content. You will enjoy live and virtual poster presentations and live oral presentations just as you would at an in-person event.
- Abstracts â As with previous meetings, all accepted and presented poster and oral abstracts will be published in a special issue of Medical Science Educator, which is the journal of IAMSE.
- Exhibitors â There will be opportunities for participants to interact with exhibitors, both individually and as part of group presentations.
- Awards â The awards and grants normally associated with the Annual Meeting will still be conferred. Individuals will be recognized through online announcements and will be honored live at the virtual meeting.
- Business Meeting â Consistent with our bylaws, each June we hold our annual business meeting as a public event to inform members about the current state of IAMSE. We will still hold this meeting and will send along more information as it becomes available
For the past several months, IAMSE has been working closely with our partners at AMFEM (Mexican Association of Faculties and Schools of Medicine) to collaborate on combining our intended in-person meetings in Cancun in June. While we are no longer working toward that specific end, our partnership with this exceptional association will simply take a new direction. We look forward to the great work we can do together safely in the future. In this regard, I am pleased to inform you that we are planning to come to Cancun as the site for our Annual Meeting in 2023 and we hope to work with AMFEM to bring you the in-person meeting that we had planned to have in 2021.
I understand that attending the IAMSE Annual Meeting in a virtual manner may not have been your original intention, but it is my hope that you will join us as we continue a tradition of rich, engaging and worthwhile educational discourse at the 2021 IAMSE Annual Meeting.
Please be on the lookout for additional information regarding the meeting in the coming weeks.
Take care of yourself and your communities.
Sincerely yours,
Neil Osheroff, PhD
President, IAMSE
IAMSE Administrative Office Closed for Thanksgiving
As those of us in the United States prepare for Thanksgiving, we would like to extend a sincere THANK YOU for being a part of our success and daily lives.
The IAMSE Administrative Office will be closed on November 26-27, 2020 for Thanksgiving. We will resume normal business hours Monday, November 30, 2020.
We are truly grateful for the support you have provided to us at IAMSE. As we look forward to 2021 we are excited for the new opportunities that may lay ahead.
Thank you,
IAMSE Admin Team
Last Call for IAMSE 2020 Board of Director Nominations
As a reminder, nominations and self-nominations for the IAMSE Board of Directors are due by November 20, 2020 at 5 PM EST. The formal âjob descriptionsâ for IAMSE Director are posted here. To submit your nomination or self-nomination by November 20, 2020 at 5 PM ET, please click here to login and view the submission page.
#IAMSECafe Welcomes Harvard’s Abby Schiff & Wolfram Goessling
Learning During & From a Crisis: The Student-Led Development of an Online COVID-19 Curriculum
Stay connected with your colleagues around the globe and join us for this week’s IAMSE Cafe round table discussion. Join our host, Kelly Quesnelle from Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine as she welcomes Abby Schiff and Wolfram Goessling (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA).
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Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 10AM ESTÂ â Learning During and From a Crisis: The Student-Led Development of an online COVID-19 Curriculum. In mid-March 2020, a group of students at Harvard Medical School came together to synthesize existing information about the COVID-19 pandemic into a unified learning resource, which is faculty reviewed, frequently updated, and freely available online. It is now used by readers in 132 countries and for credit at 32 medical schools. Drs. Schiff and Goessling will share key insights into the development process, the challenges of presenting rapidly changing subject matter, and the model of student-led curriculum design.
https://curriculum.covidstudentresponse.org/
To join the meeting please click here. The meeting password is IAMSECafe or, if you are calling in from a phone, the numeric password is 778130.
We look forward to seeing you this week!
Zooming far and wide to learn about medical education? Do tell!
As you may know, IAMSE maintains a listing of medical education conferences on our website. We’d like to expand our listing of conferences, but to do this, we need your help!
Will you be attending any in-person, virtual or hybrid conferences this year or next year? If you are, please let us know! You can send this information to us via email at support@iamse.org.
Currently, the listing of conferences is located on the IAMSE website under the Events heading as Events of Interest. Here, you will be able to find information on other conferences that may be of interest to you.
A Review from Medical Science Educator from Dr. Kurt Gilliland
This month the IAMSE Publications Committee review is taken from the article titled Reviewing the Role of Instagram in Education: Can a Photo Sharing Application Deliver Benefits to Medical and Dental Anatomy Education?, published online in Medical Science Educator, (July 2019), by Naomi Katherine May Douglas, Max Scholz, Matthew Alex Myers, Shivani Margaret Rae, Ahmad Elmansouri, Samuel Hall & Scott Border .
Douglas and colleagues conducted an audit investigating current Instagram accounts focusing on anatomy education and found a variety of successful teaching styles. Their work was a collaboration of the University of Bristol, Brunel University London, University of Southampton, and Southampton General Hospital, all of the UK.
With reduction in curriculum time devoted to anatomy education, faculty have begun to incorporate social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. While these various forms of social media have advantages (e.g., encouraging collaboration/revision, creating enthusiasm, providing quick feedback, and sharing other media easily), they also have disadvantages (e.g., distraction, privacy/safety, need for constant instructor engagement, potential professionalism issues, and possibly no impact on student performance). The authors recognized that Instagram in particular is ultilized more and more by students and thus decided to review its role in medical and dental anatomy education.
Instagram, which was launched in 2010, allows users to share photographs and short videos and to browse images shared by others very easily, expressing comments about and approval of those images. Instagram has become particularly useful for image-based disciplines such as radiology, surgery, pathology, and of course anatomy/histology. The strength of this article is its Instagram evaluation, which was conducted in the fashion of a literature review. Using keywords (e.g., anatomy education, dentistry, medicine, etc.), they discovered and categorized 80 anatomy-related Instagram sites according to search code, page title, date of first post, number of posts, country of origin, discipline/subject area, content type, number of followers at two different points in time, profit status, institutional vs. individual, and staff vs. student.
The authors conclude that Instagram could be helpful for anatomy education in medicine and dentistry due to benefits such as ease of use, hashtags, and effectiveness in conveying visual topics. They also point out, however, that there is a lack of performance data to determine a true impact on education, and they indicate that there are limitations such as passive learning and the requirement of committed staff to oversee the use.
This paper presents an excellent comparison of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram and in a very detailed fashion describes utilization of Instagram in anatomy education in medicine and dentistry with a discussion of pros and cons of its use.
Kurt Gilliland, PhD
Associate Dean of Curriculum
Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology
University of North Carolina School of Medicine
Member, IAMSE Publications Committee
Reminder #IAMSE21 Call for Poster & Oral Abstracts Due December 1
The International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) would like to remind you that the call for poster and oral abstracts is still open for the 25th Annual IAMSE Conference to be held June 12-15, 2021. The IAMSE meeting offers opportunities for faculty development and networking, bringing together medical sciences and medical education across the continuum of healthcare education. New in 2021, IAMSE will be offering registration for the in-person event as well as virtual-only registration.
Deadline: December 1, 2020
Have you always wanted to submit a poster but you can’t attend the meeting in person? No problem! IAMSE encourages abstract submission for posters and orals even if you are unable to attend the face-to-face meeting in Cancun. All accepted posters and orals will be hosted on our conference website for viewing.
There is no limit on the number of abstracts you may submit, but it is unlikely that more than two presentations per presenter can be accepted due to scheduling complexities. Abstract acceptance notifications will be returned in March 2021.
Register Now for the IAMSE Winter 2021 Webcast Audio Seminar Series!
The debate about the pros and cons of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 score reporting has been ongoing for over a decade. The issues are complicated and both positive and negative aspects of score reporting can be cited, depending on where you are positioned in the UME-GME continuum. In March of 2019, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), American Medical Association (AMA), the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) convened a multi-stakeholder Invitational Conference on USMLE Scoring (InCUS) to explore issues and concerns regarding the USMLE Step 1 exam and to consider recommendations specific to USMLE score reporting and the broader system of transition from UME to GME. A general consensus emerged: the current UME-GME transition system is flawed and not meeting the needs of stakeholders. As a result of further stakeholder discussions, the USMLE decided that beginning with the administration of Step 1 in 2022, the exam will be scored as pass/fail and no numeric score will be reported. Join IAMSE beginning January 7, 2021, as they present:
USMLE STEP-1 is Going to Pass/Fail
Now what do we do?
In this five-part series beginning Thursday, January 7, 2021, recognized experts from the various stakeholder groups will present and discuss the impact of this decision, identify challenges to their respective programs and explore creative ways to address the consequences of this important medical education milestone. These thought-provoking sessions will include the perspectives of allopathic and osteopathic residency program directors, basic science faculty, undergraduate medical education curriculum designers, clinical educators, and programs that involve international medical students matriculating to the United States.
Sessions in the Winter 2021 series include:
- January 7 at 12pm EST – Mark Jordan and Justin La present “The Challenges of Resident Candidate Assessment and Selection”
- January 14 at 12pm ESTÂ – Doug Gould presents “Pass/Fail Step 1: Implications for a Foundational Science Department”
- January 21 at 12pm ESTÂ – Jonathan Amiel presents “USMLE Step 1 P/F: A UME Curriculum Deanâs Perspective”
- January 28 at 12pm ESTÂ – Brenda Roman and Bruce Morgenstern present “Step 1 Going Pass-Fail: Are We Just Kicking the Can Down the Road?”
- February 4 at 12pm ESTÂ – Jack Boulet and Bob Can present “USMLE Step 1: Osteopathic and International Perspectives”
As always, IAMSE Student Members can register for the series for FREE! Email support@iamse.org for more information.